| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: helping to nurse him. I look back with pleasure on the nights when
it fell to me to be on duty by him, and I sat in the balcony by
the open window, listening to his breathing and every sound in his
room. My chief duty, as the strongest of the family, was to lift
him up while the sheets were being changed. When they were making
the bed, I had to hold him in my arms like a child.
I remember how my muscles quivered one day with the exertion.
He looked at me with astonishment and said:
"You surely don't find me heavy? What nonsense!"
I thought of the day when he had given me a bad time at riding
in the woods as a boy, and kept asking, "You're not tired?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: had never yet perceived that he was reading the same number over and
over again. Perhaps a doctor would have observed with interest the
connection that evidently existed between the recurring and spasmodic
demands for the newspaper and the atmospheric variations of the
weather.
Usually when his wife had company, which happened nearly every
evening, for the neighbors, pitying her situation, would frequently
come to play at boston in her salon, Margaritis remained silent in a
corner and never stirred. But the moment ten o'clock began to strike
on a clock which he kept shut up in a large oblong closet, he rose at
the stroke with the mechanical precision of the figures which are made
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: Concha,--Conchita, her firstborn, who now slept far away in the
old churchyard at Barcelona. She had tried to become
resigned,--not to think. But the child would come back night
after night, though the earth lay heavy upon her--night after
night, through long distances of Time and Space. Oh! the fancied
clinging of infant-lips!--the thrilling touch of little ghostly
hands!--those phantom-caresses that torture mothers' hearts! ...
Night after night, through many a month of pain. Then for a time
the gentle presence ceased to haunt her,--seemed to have lain
down to sleep forever under the high bright grass and yellow
flowers. Why did it return, that night of all nights, to kiss
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