| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: I had done, each of them gave me a god and prayed me to leave them.
'That night, as I lay on a cushion in the tea-house that is in the
Street of Pomegranates, the guards of the Emperor entered and led
me to the palace. As I went in they closed each door behind me,
and put a chain across it. Inside was a great court with an arcade
running all round. The walls were of white alabaster, set here and
there with blue and green tiles. The pillars were of green marble,
and the pavement of a kind of peach-blossom marble. I had never
seen anything like it before.
'As I passed across the court two veiled women looked down from a
balcony and cursed me. The guards hastened on, and the butts of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: the discharge of heavy artillery.
Twenty times had the gun been fired, and it was on the point of being loaded
for the last time, when the colonel laid his hand upon the arm of the man
who had the ramrod. "Stop!" he said; "we will have a ball this time.
Let us put the range of the piece to the test."
"A good idea!" replied the major. "Corporal, you hear the orders."
In quick time an artillery-wagon was on the spot, and the men
lifted out a full-sized shot, weighing 200 lbs., which,
under ordinary circumstances, the cannon would carry about four miles.
It was proposed, by means of telescopes, to note the place
where the ball first touched the water, and thus to obtain
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Flora's
special society and there become aware--it was almost a luxury!--
that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon
the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation
and then had accused me to my face of having "cried."
I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I
could literally--for the time, at all events--rejoice, under this
fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared.
To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce
their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty
of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred
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