| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: the Sabbath, they abstain from all those sorts of flesh which are
forbidden by the law. Brothers espouse the wives of their brothers,
and to conclude, they observe a great number of Jewish ceremonies.
Though they know the words which Jesus Christ appointed to be used
in the administration of baptism, they have without scruple
substituted others in their place, which makes the validity of their
baptism, and the reality of their Christianity, very doubtful. They
have a few names of saints, the same with those in the Roman
martyrology, but they often insert others, as Zama la Cota, the Life
of Truth; Ongulari, the Evangelist; Asca Georgi, the Mouth of Saint
George.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: At five o'clock in the evening, before that fleeting twilight
which binds night to day in tropical zones, Conseil and I
were astonished by a curious spectacle.
It was a shoal of argonauts travelling along on the surface of the ocean.
We could count several hundreds. They belonged to the tubercle kind
which are peculiar to the Indian seas.
These graceful molluscs moved backwards by means of their
locomotive tube, through which they propelled the water already
drawn in. Of their eight tentacles, six were elongated,
and stretched out floating on the water, whilst the other two,
rolled up flat, were spread to the wing like a light sail.
 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: his visible search for the obscure suburb I seemed to have named.
"I don't 'want' anything - the proposal's your own. But you must
remember that that's the way we do things NOW," said Mr. Pinhorn
with another dig Mr. Deedy.
Unregenerate as I was I could read the queer implications of this
speech. The present owner's superior virtue as well as his deeper
craft spoke in his reference to the late editor as one of that
baser sort who deal in false representations. Mr. Deedy would as
soon have sent me to call on Neil Paraday as he would have
published a "holiday-number"; but such scruples presented
themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his successor, whose own
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