| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets
jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary
haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered
if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated
my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just
shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he
was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the room. He
informed me that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered later
that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.
Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife
The Great Gatsby |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: pulled him from the snowdrift and bound him tightly with many coils of
the stout rope. And then they carried the kidnapped Santa Claus away
to their mountain, where they thrust the prisoner into a secret cave
and chained him to the rocky wall so that he could not escape.
"Ha, ha!" laughed the Daemons, rubbing their hands together with cruel
glee. "What will the children do now? How they will cry and scold
and storm when they find there are no toys in their stockings and no
gifts on their Christmas trees! And what a lot of punishment they
will receive from their parents, and how they will flock to our Caves
of Selfishness, and Envy, and Hatred, and Malice! We have done a
mighty clever thing, we Daemons of the Caves!"
A Kidnapped Santa Claus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: along the lake, nor in the sunset clouds which presently eddied behind the
lavender-misted mountains, could Babbitt find the spirit of Paul as a
reassuring presence. He was so lonely that after supper he stopped to talk
with an ancient old lady, a gasping and steadily discoursing old lady, by the
stove in the hotel-office. He told her of Ted's presumable future triumphs in
the State University and of Tinka's remarkable vocabulary till he was homesick
for the home he had left forever.
Through the darkness, through that Northern pine-walled silence, he blundered
down to the lake-front and found a canoe. There were no paddles in it but with
a board, sitting awkwardly amidships and poking at the water rather than
paddling, he made his way far out on the lake. The lights of the hotel and
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