| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: plants and trees: for instance, the tallest horses and oxen are
between four and five inches in height, the sheep an inch and
half, more or less: their geese about the bigness of a sparrow,
and so the several gradations downwards till you come to the
smallest, which to my sight, were almost invisible; but nature
has adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper
for their view: they see with great exactness, but at no great
distance. And, to show the sharpness of their sight towards
objects that are near, I have been much pleased with observing a
cook pulling a lark, which was not so large as a common fly; and
a young girl threading an invisible needle with invisible silk.
 Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: roundness. As she passed them the girl, with a shrinking movement,
drew back her skirts.
Chapter XIII
Jimmie did not return home for a number of days after the
fight with Pete in the saloon. When he did, he approached with
extreme caution.
He found his mother raving. Maggie had not returned home.
The parent continually wondered how her daughter could come to such
a pass. She had never considered Maggie as a pearl dropped
unstained into Rum Alley from Heaven, but she could not conceive
how it was possible for her daughter to fall so low as to bring
 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On Horsemanship by Xenophon: [12] i.e. "the metacarpals and metatarsals."
[13] Or, "and become varicose, with the result that the shanks swell
whilst the skin recedes from the bone."
[14] Or, "suspensory ligament"? Possibly Xenophon's anatomy is wrong,
and he mistook the back sinew for a bone like the fibula. The part
in question might intelligibly enough, if not technically, be
termed {perone}, being of the brooch-pin order.
If the young horse in walking bends his knees flexibly, you may safely
conjecture that when he comes to be ridden he will have flexible legs,
since the quality of suppleness invariably increases with age.[15]
Supple knees are highly esteemed and with good reason, rendering as
 On Horsemanship |