| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: quandary was great. Against every interest he had attached
himself. They would have to meet things together. Before they
went home that evening at Nice the boy had said, clinging to his
arm:
"Well, at any rate you'll hang on to the last."
"To the last?"
"Till you're fairly beaten."
"YOU ought to be fairly beaten!" cried the young man, drawing him
closer.
CHAPTER IV
A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in
bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour
of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table
light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the
pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the
dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little
world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as
frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How
well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing I should have
expected him, of all people, to do well."
Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Murmured of blue-sea mornings, noons of gold,
Green evenings streaked with lilac, bee-starred nights.
Confused soft clouds of music fled above me.
Sharp shafts of music dazzled my eyes and pierced me.
I ran and turned and spun and danced in the sunlight,
Shrank, sometimes, from the freezing silence of beauty,
Or crept once more to the warm white cave of sleep.
No, I shall not say 'this is why I praise you--
Because you say such wise things, or such foolish. . .'
You would not have me say what you know better?
Let me instead be silent, only saying--:
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