| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: The untended dead, the Tropic sun -
The thunder of the murderous gun -
The cut-throat crew - the Captain's curse -
The tempest blustering worse and worse -
These have I known and these can stand,
But you - I settle out of hand!'
Out flashed the cutlass, down went Ben
Dead and rotten, there and then.
Poem: II - THE BUILDER'S DOOM
In eighteen-twenty Deacon Thin
Feu'd the land and fenced it in,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: vividness. I tried to get into the mysterious dwelling to search out
the heart of this solemn story, this drama which had killed three
persons.
"Rosalie became in my eyes the most interesting being in Vendome. As I
studied her, I detected signs of an inmost thought, in spite of the
blooming health that glowed in her dimpled face. There was in her soul
some element of ruth or of hope; her manner suggested a secret, like
the expression of devout souls who pray in excess, or of a girl who
has killed her child and for ever hears its last cry. Nevertheless,
she was simple and clumsy in her ways; her vacant smile had nothing
criminal in it, and you would have pronounced her innocent only from
La Grande Breteche |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Four Arthurian Romances by Chretien DeTroyes: right in the neck beside the cheek. There is not a mesh that
does not spread, and the sword cuts the flesh of his neck beneath
the shining mail, so that it causes the blood to start. Then the
lion thinks that he sees his master and companion dead. You
never heard greater grief narrated or told about anything than he
now began to show. He casts himself about, and scratches and
cries, and has the wish to kill himself with the sword with which
he thinks his master has killed himself. Taking the sword from
him with his teeth he lays it on a fallen tree, and steadies it
on a trunk behind, so that it will not slip or give way, when he
hurls his breast against it, His intention was nearly
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