| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: dreadful even than the sound of her leaping.
"Ah!" he said, "then she's taken a fancy to me, she has never met
anyone before, and it is really quite flattering to have her first
love." That instant the man fell into one of those movable quicksands
so terrible to travelers and from which it is impossible to save
oneself. Feeling himself caught, he gave a shriek of alarm; the
panther seized him with her teeth by the collar, and, springing
vigorously backwards, drew him as if by magic out of the whirling
sand.
"Ah, Mignonne!" cried the soldier, caressing her enthusiastically;
"we're bound together for life and death but no jokes, mind!" and he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised
that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than
the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without
interest. We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy
before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be 'very fine.'
His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.
He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes
about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian
Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and
Elizabethan translations of CUPID AND PSYCHE, and the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: the walls are not paneled; they have been covered instead with a
saffron-colored paper, bordered with green. The walnut-wood rafters
are left visible, and the intervening spaces filled with a kind of
white plaster.
The first story consists of two large whitewashed bedrooms with stone
chimney-pieces, less elaborately carved than those in the rooms
beneath. Every door and window is on the south side of the house, save
a single door to the north, contrived behind the staircase to give
access to the vineyard. Against the western wall stands a
supplementary timber-framed structure, all the woodwork exposed to the
weather being fledged with slates, so that the walls are checkered
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