| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: The radish bed and what it symbolised had turned my first joy
into grief. This walk and border me too much of my father reminded,
and of all he had been to me. What I knew of good he had taught me,
and what I had of happiness was through him. Only once during
all the years we lived together had we been of different opinions
and fallen out, and it was the one time I ever saw him severe.
I was four years old, and demanded one Sunday to be taken
to church. My father said no, for I had never been to church,
and the German service is long and exhausting. I implored.
He again said no. I <88> implored again, and showed such a
pious disposition, and so earnest a determination to behave well,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: with Miss Willella Learight!
"An hour by sun they come loping back, and stopped at Uncle Emsley's
gate. The sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each
other sentences all sprightful and sagacious for a while. And then
this feathered Jackson flies up in his saddle and raises his little
stewpot of a hat, and trots off in the direction of his mutton ranch.
By this time I had turned the sand out of my boots and unpinned myself
from the prickly pear; and by the time he gets half a mile out of
Pimienta, I singlefoots up beside him on my bronc.
"I said that snoozer was pink-eyed, but he wasn't. His seeing
arrangement was grey enough, but his eye-lashes was pink and his hair
Heart of the West |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: On the evening of the day which I received Phillips'letter I was
at Caermaen, and standing beneath the mouldering Roman walls,
white with the winters of seventeen hundred years, I looked over
the meadow where once had stood the older temple of the "God of
the Deeps," and saw a house gleaming in the sunlight. It was
the house where Helen had lived. I stayed at Caermaen for
several days. The people of the place, I found, knew little and
had guessed less. Those whom I spoke to on the matter seemed
surprised that an antiquarian (as I professed myself to be)
should trouble about a village tragedy, of which they gave a
very commonplace version, and, as you may imagine, I told
The Great God Pan |
