| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: which carpeted the river, rose above its surface and undulated upon
it, yielding to its caprices and swaying to the turmoil of the water
when the mill-wheels lashed it. Here and there were mounds of gravel,
against which the wavelets broke in fringes that shimmered in the
sunlight. Amaryllis, water-lilies, reeds, and phloxes decorated the
banks with their glorious tapestry. A trembling bridge of rotten
planks, the abutments swathed with flowers, and the hand-rails green
with perennials and velvet mosses drooping to the river but not
falling to it; mouldering boats, fishing-nets; the monotonous sing-
song of a shepherd; ducks paddling among the islands or preening on
the "jard,"--a name given to the coarse sand which the Loire brings
The Lily of the Valley |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Koran: with; yet they misbelieve in the merciful! Say, 'He He my Lord;
there is no god but He; upon Him do I rely, and unto Him is my
repentance.'
And though it were a Koran by which the mountains were moved, or
by which the earth were cut up, or the dead made to speak- nay,
God's is the command altogether! Did not those who believed know
that if God had pleased He would have guided men altogether?
And a striking calamity shall not cease to overtake those who
misbelieve for what they have wrought, or to alight close by their
dwellings; until God's promise comes- verily, God fails not in His
promise.
The Koran |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why
Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers
went to the galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no
such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country
gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the
shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal
servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play,
Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as
normal rank and file men. In Julius Caesar, Shakespear went to work
with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide
and transfiguring the republicans. Indeed hero-worshippers have never
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