| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: never likely to receive; a great sum out of my small earnings!
I lov'd him, notwithstanding, for he had many amiable qualities.
I had by no means improv'd my fortune; but I had picked up some very
ingenious acquaintance, whose conversation was of great advantage to me;
and I had read considerably.
We sail'd from Gravesend on the 23d of July, 1726. For the incidents
of the voyage, I refer you to my journal, where you will find them
all minutely related. Perhaps the most important part of that
journal is the plan<5> to be found in it, which I formed at sea,
for regulating my future conduct in life. It is the more remarkable,
as being formed when I was so young, and yet being pretty faithfully
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: I have taken notice with regret, that few stories
worth reading have been written that did not con-
tain drink of some sort. Down go the fluids, from
Arizona Dick's three fingers of red pizen to the in-
efficacious Oolong that nerves Lionel Montressor to
repartee in the "Dotty Dialogues." So, in such
good company I may introduce an absinthe drip --
one absinthe drip, dripped through a silver dripper,
orderly, opalescent, cool, green-eyed -- deceptive.
Kerner was a fool. Besides that, he was an artist
and my good friend. Now, if there is one thing on
The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk,
and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never
become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the
building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all
large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and
more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the
fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed,
their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly
miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had
taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to
Walking |
