| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: as far as the eye can reach; and after driving through it for miles
you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue of arching trees,
upon the glistening, oily sea, with the orange-coloured
sails of distant fishing-smacks shilling in the sunlight.
Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather,
and the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating.
The humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are
the only sounds in summer, and in winter the stillness is
the stillness of death.
Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is
so infested by mosquitoes during the season when picnics seem
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum: having again escaped all pain and discomfort; but Prince Marvel seated
himself quietly upon a stool and looked at the scowling face of King
Terribus with real amusement.
The monarch of Spor had never before been so foiled and scorned by any
living creature. Defeated and humbled before his own people, he bowed
his crimson head on his hands and sullenly regarded his foe with his
top eye. Then it was that the idea came to him that no ordinary
mortal could have thwarted him so easily, and he began to fear he was
dealing--perhaps unawares--with some great magician or sorcerer. That
a fairy should have assumed a mortal form he never once considered,
for such a thing was until then unheard of in the Enchanted Island of
The Enchanted Island of Yew |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of
others, that are there expressed and were practised on so
great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a
book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved.
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings - those
very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address
lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when
you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man
himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked
into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another
bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the
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