| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: And then I turned to note the effect of this strange
experience upon Dian. She still sat shrouded in the great skin.
"Come, come," I cried, laughing, "come out of your shell.
No Mahar eyes can reach you here," and I leaned over and
snatched the lion skin from her. And then I shrank back
upon my seat in utter horror.
The thing beneath the skin was not Dian--it was a
hideous Mahar. Instantly I realized the trick that Hooja
had played upon me, and the purpose of it. Rid of me,
forever as he doubtless thought, Dian would be at his mercy.
Frantically I tore at the steering wheel in an effort
At the Earth's Core |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: open-mouthed, wide-eyed gazers is always to be found before it.
Despair, wonder, envy, and rebellion smolder in the eyes of those
gazers. No shop window show should be so diabolically set forth as
to arouse such sensations in the breast of the beholder. It is a
work of art, that window; a breeder of anarchism, a destroyer of
contentment, a second feast of Tantalus. It boasts peaches, dewy
and golden, when peaches have no right to be; plethoric, purple
bunches of English hothouse grapes are there to taunt the
ten-dollar-a-week clerk whose sick wife should be in the hospital;
strawberries glow therein when shortcake is a last summer's memory,
and forced cucumbers remind us that we are taking ours in the form
Buttered Side Down |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: as his blood-red sunrises. They were followed by gray days under
the cover of high, motionless clouds that looked as if carved in a
slab of ash-coloured marble. And each mean starved sunset left us
calling with imprecations upon the West Wind even in its most
veiled misty mood to wake up and give us our liberty, if only to
rush on and dash the heads of our ships against the very walls of
our unapproachable home.
XXIX.
In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece
of crystal and refracting like a prism, we could see the appalling
numbers of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal
The Mirror of the Sea |
