| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: her eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble,
I felt--I saw--my livid predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat,
and I was conscious, more than all, of what I should have from this
instant to deal with in the astounding little attitude of Flora.
Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently entered,
breaking, even while there pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious
private triumph, into breathless reassurance.
"She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there--and you never see nothing,
my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel--when poor Miss Jessel's dead and buried?
WE know, don't we, love?--and she appealed, blundering in, to the child.
"It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke--and we'll go home as fast
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: The rugged grandeur of the opening discourse of Timaeus may be compared
with the more harmonious beauty of a similar passage in the Phaedrus.
To the same cause we may attribute the want of plan. Plato had not the
command of his materials which would have enabled him to produce a perfect
work of art. Hence there are several new beginnings and resumptions and
formal or artificial connections; we miss the 'callida junctura' of the
earlier dialogues. His speculations about the Eternal, his theories of
creation, his mathematical anticipations, are supplemented by desultory
remarks on the one immortal and the two mortal souls of man, on the
functions of the bodily organs in health and disease, on sight, hearing,
smell, taste, and touch. He soars into the heavens, and then, as if his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would
happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It
was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be
enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then
suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the
changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an
enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the
bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces
before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished,
1984 |
