| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: skylight with my sextant--I overheard him--you know how he sits
hanging over her chair and talking away without properly opening his
mouth--yes I caught the word right enough. He was alluding to the
captain as "the jailer." The jail . . . !"
Franklin broke off with a profane execration. A silence reigned for
a long time and the slight, very gentle rolling of the ship slipping
before the N.E. trade-wind seemed to be a soothing device for
lulling to sleep the suspicions of men who trust themselves to the
sea.
A deep sigh was heard followed by the mate's voice asking dismally
if that was the way one would speak of a man to whom one wished
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: And so now he lay impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous
forefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that,
well, here was another day. What day was it? L'see now.
Yesterday was--yesterday. A little feeling of panic came over
him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had been. He counted
back laboriously and decided that today must be Thursday. Not
that it made any difference.
They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had
not digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be
assimilated. There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing
nothing, gaining nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling
One Basket |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance
-- I never saw one walk -- and then suddenly, before you could say
Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding
up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and
talking to all the universe at the same time -- for no reason that I
could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length
he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about
in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my
wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and
there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to
time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs
Walden |
