| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: hours after being received. His pockets were empty, but two small
leathern wallets were found under his pillow; and these formed
the package which the director left in my charge. They were full
of papers in a foreign language, he said, and he supposed I might
be able to ascertain the stranger's name and home from them.
I took up the wallets, which were worn and greasy from long
service, opened them, and saw that they were filled with scraps,
fragments, and folded pieces of paper, nearly every one of which
had been carried for a long time loose in the pocket. Some were
written in pen and ink, and some in pencil, but all were equally
brown, worn, and unsavory in appearance. In turning them over,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: He next strove to drag from the very depths of man's understanding the
real sense of the word fall, which occurs in every language. He
appealed to the most widely-spread traditions in evidence of this one
true origin, explaining, with much lucidity, the passion all men have
for rising, mounting--an instinctive ambition, the perennial
revelations of our destiny.
He displayed the whole universe at a glance, and described the nature
of God Himself circulating in a full tide from the centre to the
extremities, and from the extremities to the centre again. Nature was
one and homogeneous. In the most seemingly trivial, as in the most
stupendous work, everything obeyed that law; each created object
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: fist to receive it. This she did with extreme solemnity,
though I tried to treat the affair a little as a joke.
It was in no jocular strain, yet it was with simplicity,
that she inquired, weighing the money in her two palms:
"Don't you think it's too much?" To which I replied that that
would depend upon the amount of pleasure I should get for it.
Hereupon she turned away from me quickly, as she had done
the day before, murmuring in a tone different from any she had
used hitherto: "Oh, pleasure, pleasure--there's no pleasure
in this house!"
After this, for a long time, I never saw her, and I wondered that
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