| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out,
with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath
of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity -- that
his tempered steel and elasticity are lost -- he for ever
afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external
to himself. His pervading and continual hope -- a hallucination,
which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like
the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief
space after death -- is, that finally, and in no long time, by
some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to
The Scarlet Letter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: passenger more provident than myself caused a marked elevation in my
spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end and back again for
an oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position. It seemed no disgrace
to he confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once I
found their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other
class. I do not mean that my friends could have sat down without
embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table of a duke. That
does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage.
Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow-
passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: neighborhood to dine with him, and, after regaling them
bountifully, to take his pay in subjecting them to all sorts of
outrageous tricks, with the help of his band of willing domestics.
Now this particular merchant had been invited, and had attended;
but, being a very wide-awake, shrewd person, he saw what was
coming, and dexterously slipped away from the banquet without being
perceived. The Prince vowed vengeance, on discovering the escape,
and he was not a man to forget his word.
Impelled by such opposite passions, both parties ran with
astonishing speed. The merchant was the taller, but his long
caftan, hastily ungirdled, swung behind him and dragged in the air.
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