| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o'er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
But warmed with that uchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: interest of the story depends: he 'skips' over all the descriptions of
scenery, and every passage that looks rather dull: he doesn't half attend
to the passages he does read: he goes on reading merely from want of
resolution to find another occupation--for hours after he ought to have
put the book aside: and reaches the 'FINIS' in a state of utter
weariness and depression! B puts his whole soul into the thing--on the
principle that 'whatever is worth doing is worth doing well':
he masters the genealogies: he calls up pictures before his 'mind's eye'
as he reads about the scenery: best of all, he resolutely shuts the
book at the end of some chapter, while his interest is yet at its
keenest, and turns to other subjects; so that, when next he allows
Sylvie and Bruno |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: After all, his life had been too starved. . . .
Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself
saying: "But I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he
turned away. For such summer dreams it was too late;
but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of
comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.
He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were
to meet; and together they walked again across the
Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads to
the Chamber of Deputies.
Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his
|
