| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: should be avoided. What more natural, to the mind of a European,
than that the Mataafas should fall upon the Germans in this hour of
their disadvantage? But they had no other thought than to assist;
and those who now rallied beside Knappe braved (as they supposed)
in doing so a double danger, from the fury of the sea and the
weapons of their enemies. About nine, a quarter-master swam
ashore, and reported all the officers and some sixty men alive but
in pitiable case; some with broken limbs, others insensible from
the drenching of the breakers. Later in the forenoon, certain
valorous Samoans succeeded in reaching the wreck and returning with
a line; but it was speedily broken; and all subsequent attempts
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: The horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside and broke into
a gallop.
After some time they left the clay road and rattled again
over rough-paven streets. Most of the windows were dark,
but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against
some lamplit blind. He watched them curiously. They moved
like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things.
He hated them. A dull rage was in his heart. As they turned
a corner, a woman yelled something at them from an open door,
and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards.
The driver beat at them with his whip.
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: indeed, I do not think I remember anywhere else so great a choice
of services as were here offered to the devout. And while the
bells made merry in the sunshine, all the world with his dog was
out shooting among the beets and colza.
In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a
foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music 'O FRANCE, MES
AMOURS.' It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady
called in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left.
She was not the first nor the second who had been taken with the
song. There is something very pathetic in the love of the French
people, since the war, for dismal patriotic music-making. I have
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