| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: and flashes overhead. Then comes a vicious effort; for by this time
your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and you are spinning
round a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all the lights in
all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet; and the next you
are racing once more in the shadow of the night with close-shut teeth
and beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be landed on the
highroad by the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmosphere
tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with
stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the
pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the life of
man upon his planet.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: laughing.
JENNY
Why, mustn't I laugh, Mr. Jessamy?
JESSAMY
You may smile, but, as my lord says, nothing can
authorise a laugh.
JENNY
Well, but I can't help laughing.--Have you seen
him, Mr. Jessamy? ha, ha, ha!
JESSAMY
Seen whom?
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Animal Farm by George Orwell: just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us
who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength;
and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are
slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning
of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is
free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
"But is this simply part of the order of nature? Is it because this land
of ours is so poor that it cannot afford a decent life to those who dwell
upon it? No, comrades, a thousand times no! The soil of England is
fertile, its climate is good, it is capable of affording food in abundance
to an enormously greater number of animals than now inhabit it. This
Animal Farm |
