| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: of hopeless, handicapped love.
He could not interfere. Was he not Arabella's? He was unable
to go on further, and retraced his steps towards Christminster.
Every tread of his feet seemed to say to him that he must
on no account stand in the schoolmaster's way with Sue.
Phillotson was perhaps twenty years her senior, but many a happy
marriage had been made in such conditions of age. The ironical
clinch to his sorrow was given by the thought that the intimacy
between his cousin and the schoolmaster had been brought about
entirely by himself.
VI
Jude the Obscure |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at thirty; and then,
like my grocer buried in Pere Lachaise, a good husband and a good
father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings, codes,
verses, a romance--and all with more range than precision. Did he not
aim at making all Europe France? And after making us weigh on the
earth in such a way as to change the laws of gravitation, he left us
poorer than on the day when he first laid hands on us; while he, who
had taken an empire by his name, lost his name on the frontier of his
empire in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man all thought and all
action, who comprehended Desaix and Fouche."
"All despotism and all justice at the right moments. The true king!"
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Where'er I went, whate'er I willed,
One promised land my fancy filled.
Hence the long roads my home I made;
Tossed much in ships; have often laid
Below the uncurtained sky my head,
Rain-deluged and wind-buffeted:
And many a thousand hills I crossed
And corners turned - Love's labour lost,
Till, Lady, to your isle of sun
I came, not hoping; and, like one
Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes,
|
