| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: Here all the sounds are unhurried and cool;
Every silence is kith to a sound; they are wed,
They are mated, are mingled, are tangled, are
bound;
Every hush is in love with a sound, every sound
By the law of its life to some silence is bound.
Then here will we hide; idle here and abide,
In the covert here, close by the waterside--
Here, where the slim flattered reeds are aquiver
With the exquisite hints of the reticent river,
Here, where the lips of this pool are the lips
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: coward.
In other states the man who shows himself base and cowardly wins to
himself an evil reputation and the nickname of a coward, but that is
all. For the rest he buys and sells in the same market-place as the
good man; he sits beside him at play; he exercises with him in the
same gymnasium, and all as suits his humour. But at Lacedaemon there
is not one man who would not feel ashamed to welcome the coward at the
common mess-tabe, or to try conclusions with such an antagonist in a
wrestling bout. Consider the day's round of his existence. The sides
are being picked up in a football match,[2] but he is left out as the
odd man: there is no place for him. During the choric dance[3] he is
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: of exquisite fifteenth-century workmanship, were rapidly decaying
in an aisle of the church; and it became politic to make drawings
of their worm-eaten contours ere they were battered past
recognition in the turmoil of the so-called restoration.
He entered the house at sunset, and the world was pleasant again
to the two fair-haired ones. A momentary pang of disappointment
had, nevertheless, passed through Elfride when she casually
discovered that he had not come that minute post-haste from
London, but had reached the neighbourhood the previous evening.
Surprise would have accompanied the feeling, had she not
remembered that several tourists were haunting the coast at this
 A Pair of Blue Eyes |