| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: I need wear no draperies, I had that ground-bed of good feeling
and keen sensitiveness which must always be the birthright of any
man who is strong enough to climb to any height whatever, after
having long trampled in the bogs of poverty. I could obtain
nothing from my family, nor from my home, beyond my inadequate
allowance. In short, at that time, I breakfasted off a roll which
the baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold me cheap because it was
left from yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into
milk; thus my morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only
every other day in a boarding-house where the meal cost me
sixteen sous. You know as well as I what care I must have taken
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: as Mainhall himself when, at the end of the
play, she came again and again before the
curtain, panting a little and flushed, her eyes
dancing and her eager, nervous little mouth
tremulous with excitement.
When Alexander returned to his hotel--
he shook Mainhall at the door of the theatre--
he had some supper brought up to his room,
and it was late before he went to bed.
He had not thought of Hilda Burgoyne for
years; indeed, he had almost forgotten her.
Alexander's Bridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: and laws have made it; and at this end there was terror and wailing,
innumerable different impulses all repressed by hideous doubts--at
this end, and at this only, the agony of fear.
Above all these human lives stood a strong man, the skipper; no doubts
assailed him, the chief, the king, the fatalist among them. He was
trusting in himself rather than in Providence, crying, "Bail away!"
instead of "Holy Virgin," defying the storm, in fact, and struggling
with the sea like a wrestler.
But the helpless poor at the other end of the wherry! The mother
rocking on her bosom the little one who smiled at the storm; the woman
once so frivolous and gay, and now tormented with bitter remorse; the
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