| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: this time;--and the Gulf smoothed itself once more. Irregularly
the phenomenon continued to repeat itself, each time with heavier
billowing and briefer intervals of quiet--until at last the whole
sea grew restless and shifted color and flickered green;--the
swells became shorter and changed form. Then from horizon to
shore ran one uninterrupted heaving--one vast green swarming of
snaky shapes, rolling in to hiss and flatten upon the sand. Yet
no single cirrus-speck revealed itself through all the violet
heights: there was no wind!--you might have fancied the sea had
been upheaved from beneath ...
And indeed the fancy of a seismic origin for a windless surge
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: with gray cotton bound with a green braid, and the tapestry on the
countess's frame told why the upholstery was thus covered. Such
simplicity rose to grandeur. No apartment, among all that I have seen
since, has given me such fertile, such teeming impressions as those
that filled my mind in that salon of Clochegourde, calm and composed
as the life of its mistress, where the conventual regularity of her
occupations made itself felt. The greater part of my ideas in science
or politics, even the boldest of them, were born in that room, as
perfumes emanate from flowers; there grew the mysterious plant that
cast upon my soul its fructifying pollen; there glowed the solar
warmth which developed my good and shrivelled my evil qualities.
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: The Pleiads, Hyads, and their wat'ry force;
And both the Bears is careful to behold,
And bright Orion, arm'd with burnish'd gold.
Then, when he saw no threat'ning tempest nigh,
But a sure promise of a settled sky,
He gave the sign to weigh; we break our sleep,
Forsake the pleasing shore, and plow the deep.
"And now the rising morn with rosy light
Adorns the skies, and puts the stars to flight;
When we from far, like bluish mists, descry
The hills, and then the plains, of Italy.
Aeneid |
