| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: the actual life of any man. And yet it might almost seem to fancy
that she had read the letter and taken the hint; for to Fleeming
the cruelties of fate were strangely blended with tenderness, and
when death came, it came harshly to others, to him not unkindly.
In the autumn of that same year 1875, Fleeming's father and mother
were walking in the garden of their house at Merchiston, when the
latter fell to the ground. It was thought at the time to be a
stumble; it was in all likelihood a premonitory stroke of palsy.
From that day, there fell upon her an abiding panic fear; that
glib, superficial part of us that speaks and reasons could allege
no cause, science itself could find no mark of danger, a son's
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: another had taken up a position in the piece of sky which now
confronted him where his walls and chimneys had formerly raised
their outlines. The house had jutted awkwardly into the road, and
the opening caused by its absence was very distinct.
In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels
became audible; and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the
blank sky, bearing down upon him with the bend in the lane which
here occurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He
could discern the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of
a phaeton, a groom being just visible behind. Presently there was
a slight scrape, then a scream. Winterborne went across to the
The Woodlanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: Little Toomai could only count up to ten, and he counted again and
again on his fingers till he lost count of the tens, and his head
began to swim. Outside the clearing he could hear them crashing
in the undergrowth as they worked their way up the hillside, but
as soon as they were within the circle of the tree trunks they
moved like ghosts.
There were white-tusked wild males, with fallen leaves and
nuts and twigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds
of their ears; fat, slow-footed she-elephants, with restless,
little pinky black calves only three or four feet high running
under their stomachs; young elephants with their tusks just
The Jungle Book |
