| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: from the lace; and the darkness of the intermediate Shadow
swallowed them up,--they were gone. And again the bubbles of light
shot, and sailed, and undulated, growing thicker and thicker and
more wildly confused in their movements.
The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from
the aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she
held letters,--the very letters over which I had seen THE Hand
close; and behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if
to listen, and then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and
over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face as of a man long
drowned,--bloated, bleached, seaweed tangled in its dripping hair;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: Mademoiselle, who had grown to be "superb," and Paul, who had become
singularly sturdy; she spoke also of their deceased grandparents, whom
the Liebards had known, for they had been in the service of the family
for several generations.
Like its owners, the farm had an ancient appearance. The beams of the
ceiling were mouldy, the walls black with smoke and the windows grey
with dust. The oak sideboard was filled with all sorts of utensils,
plates, pitchers, tin bowls, wolf-traps. The children laughed when
they saw a huge syringe. There was not a tree in the yard that did not
have mushrooms growing around its foot, or a bunch of mistletoe
hanging in its branches. Several of the trees had been blown down, but
A Simple Soul |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: had failed, and scorn and death had darkened my soul for ever, when
all my feelings had been wounded and nothing was left to me here on
earth, I raised my eyes to heaven, and beheld God.
"Yet still I tried to obtain the sanction of religion for my death. I
went carefully through the Gospels, and found no passage in which
suicide was forbidden; but during the reading, the divine thought of
Christ, the Saviour of men dawned in me. Certainly He had said nothing
about the immortality of the soul, but He had spoken of the glorious
kingdom of His Father; He had nowhere forbidden parricide, but He
condemned all that was evil. The glory of His evangelists, and the
proof of their divine mission, is not so much that they made laws for
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