| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'longshore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.
The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard's was the house where I was born.
O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: was determined, as I told you, to bring a foolish career to a still
more foolish conclusion; and when you saw me throw my purse into
the street, the forty pounds were at an end. Now you know me as
well as I know myself: a fool, but consistent in his folly; and,
as I will ask you to believe, neither a whimperer nor a coward."
From the whole tone of the young man's statement it was plain that
he harboured very bitter and contemptuous thoughts about himself.
His auditors were led to imagine that his love affair was nearer
his heart than he admitted, and that he had a design on his own
life. The farce of the cream tarts began to have very much the air
of a tragedy in disguise.
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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: and above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap
and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing
fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you,
circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instant
your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that
rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss,
the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you;
the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee
glimmering by will enter into you also...
From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant
sawfish or the ravening shark?--from the herds of the porpoises,
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