| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: we fell forward against the wall. We tore off some of the strips
of hide from the raft and tried to fasten them to the wall on
either side, but there was no protuberance that would hold them.
Nothing remained to be done.
Harry and I held a consultation then and agreed on the only
possible means of escape. I turned to Desiree:
"Can you swim?"
"Parfaitement," she replied. "But against that"--
pointing to the whirling water--"I do not know. I can try."
I, who remember the black fury of that stream as it swept past
us, can appreciate the courage of her.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: the warnings of danger in the sky, and their faces were grave. The
young mother rocked her child, singing an old hymn of the Church for a
lullaby.
"If we ever get there at all," the soldier remarked to the peasant,
"it will be because the Almighty is bent on keeping us alive."
"Ah! He is the Master," said the old woman, "but I think it will be
His good pleasure to take us to Himself. Just look at that light down
there . . ." and she nodded her head as she spoke towards the sunset.
Streaks of fiery red glared from behind the masses of crimson-flushed
brown cloud that seemed about to unloose a furious gale. There was a
smothered murmur of the sea, a moaning sound that seemed to come from
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: of damnation.
When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living
in solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated
and inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the
joys, which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the
midst of remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a /No/
persuaded to be /Yes/. At every moment she seemed to come across the
pool of bitter water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish
than the traveler would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince's
table.
When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:
The Muse of the Department |
