| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three
hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gone
through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have
found traces which go far towards making him hope that the results of
their wild quest may be a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." I
greatly fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for this
Long Odds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To
them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages
for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one
long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and
not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those
of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it
the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the
dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I
have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of
boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and
almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis: Martha was.
"No," says I, cheering up a little, "I am going
to do something they ain't many fellers would
do, Martha. I'm going to forgive you. Free
and fair and open. And give you back my half of
that ring, and--"
Dern it! I had forgot I had lost that half of that
there ring! I remembered so quick it stopped me.
"You always kept it, Danny?" she asts me, very
soft-spoken, so as not to give pain to one so faithful
and so noble as what I was. "Let me see it, Danny."
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