| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Magic of Oz by L. Frank Baum: shaped dish that was silver on the outside and gold on the inside.
Into this dish he poured a powder and set fire to it. It made a thick
smoke that quite enveloped the twelve monkeys, as well as the form of
the Wizard, but when the smoke cleared away the dish had been changed
to a golden cage with silver bars, and the twelve monkeys had become
about three inches high and were all seated comfortably inside the cage.
The thousands of hairy animals who had witnessed this act of magic
were much astonished and applauded the Wizard by barking aloud and
shaking the limbs of the trees in which they sat. Dorothy said: "That
was a fine trick, Wizard!" and the Gray Ape remarked: "You are
certainly the most wonderful magician in all the Land of Oz!"
The Magic of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: distant sounds of some complicated bravura, played on the piano.
When a cross servant girl, with a bandaged eye, opened the door
to him, those sounds seemed to escape from the room and to strike
his car. It was a rhapsody of Liszt's, that everybody was tired
of, splendidly played but only to one point. When that point was
reached the same thing was repeated. Nekhludoff asked the
bandaged maid whether the inspector was in. She answered that he
was not in.
"Will he return soon?"
The rhapsody again stopped and recommenced loudly and brilliantly
again up to the same charmed point.
Resurrection |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: every experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the
mast of our day. His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the
sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has LIVED
what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random
listenings. Hear him:
Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt
of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the
word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the
greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and
hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under
headway.
What is Man? |
