| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the light was
blown out and the lantern broken.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped
beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs,
and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified
for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and
then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with
perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual - it
is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is
only one limit to their fortune - that of time; and a spendthrift
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: a few women--the men for the most part clad in little
more than a loin-cloth, the women picturesque in their colored
saris and jewelled ear and nose rings. The images of
Siva and two other gods were carried in procession round
and round the temple--three or four times; nautch girls
danced before the images, musicians, blowing horns and huge
shells, or piping on flageolets or beating tom-toms, accompanied
them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with
flaming coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each
side, elated and excited with the sense of the present
divinity, yet pleasantly free from any abject awe. The whole
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: . She closed her eyes on agonising vistas. Swift as thought she had
snatched a bright dagger from the weapons that shone along the wall.
Ay, she would escape. From that world-wide theatre of nodding heads
and buzzing whisperers, in which she now beheld herself unpitiably
martyred, one door stood open. At any cost, through any stress of
suffering, that greasy laughter should be stifled. She closed her
eyes, breathed a wordless prayer, and pressed the weapon to her
bosom.
At the astonishing sharpness of the prick, she gave a cry and awoke
to a sense of undeserved escape. A little ruby spot of blood was
the reward of that great act of desperation; but the pain had braced
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