| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: visiting various free lunches during the day. Every night I
arrived with my dollar, and that meant beer and beds for a score.
I also brought along a flour sack half full of biscuits, cold
pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and wings and scraps of
roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their schooners of
beer, made a feast of these scraps. My loyalty in coming every
night and giving them everything I could scrape together touched
them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and
while they believed in democracy as a general proposition, they
voted that it would be carrying equality too far if they
permitted me to get no more out of my work than all the rest got.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,'
he began to declaim suddenly, `for the guidance of the cause
intrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence,
wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.' `Who says that?'
I asked. `Lots of them,' he replied. `Some even write that;
and so HE comes here, a special being, as you ought to know.'
`Why ought I to know?' I interrupted, really surprised.
He paid no attention. `Yes. Today he is chief of the best station,
next year he will be assistant-manager, two years more and . .
. but I dare-say you know what he will be in two years' time.
You are of the new gang--the gang of virtue. The same people
Heart of Darkness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: when the same thing happened to me again, everything that I
heard or saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.
Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I
listened eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet.
But nothing came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the
old cabinet that was made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle
of the coals on the extinguished fire. It was a calm; or I
know that I should have heard in the roar and clatter of the
storm, as I have not heard it for so many years, the wild
career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance
and passing swiftly below the window; yet always returning
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