| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but
quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had
nothing to do. He had come - putting the thing pompously - to look
at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a century not
been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less
sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on
the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it -
the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various
members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays
of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social
flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Sportsman by Xenophon: sharp look-out.[9] As day breaks he will espy the hinds leading their
fawns to the places where they will lay them severally to rest.[10]
Having made them lie down and suckled them, they will cast anxious
glances this way and that to see that no one watches them; and then
they will severally withdraw to the side opposite and mount guard,
each over her own offspring. The huntsman, who has seen it all,[11]
will loose the dogs, and with javelins in hand himself advance towards
the nearest fawn in the direction of where he saw it laid to rest;
carefully noting the lie of the land,[12] for fear of making some
mistake; since the place itself will present a very different aspect
on approach from what it looked like at a distance.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: themselves with absolute sadness and sternness. And although I know
that this feeling is much deepened in my own mind by disappointment,
which, by chance, has attended the greater number of my cherished
purposes, I do not for that reason distrust the feeling itself,
though I am on my guard against an exaggerated degree of it: nay, I
rather believe that in periods of new effort and violent change,
disappointment is a wholesome medicine; and that in the secret of
it, as in the twilight so beloved by Titian, we may see the colours
of things with deeper truth than in the most dazzling sunshine. And
because these truths about the works of men, which I want to bring
to-day before you, are most of them sad ones, though at the same
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