| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: being eaten by bears or tossed by mad bulls because they did
not go to a particular Sabbath school, nor all the good infants
who did go as rewarded by every kind of bliss, from gilded
gingerbread to escorts of angels when they departed this life
with psalms or sermons on their lisping tongues. So nothing
came of these trials, land Jo corked up her inkstand, and
said in a fit of very wholesome humility...
"I don't know anything. I'll wait until I do before I try
again, and meantime, `sweep mud in the street' if I can't do
better, that's honest, at least." Which decision proved that
her second tumble down the beanstalk had done her some good.
Little Women |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: putting our hands to the work in precisely such a simple and
undoubting frame of mind as that in which Violet and Peony now
undertook to perform one, without so much as knowing that it was
a miracle. So thought the mother; and thought, likewise, that the
new snow, just fallen from heaven, would be excellent material to
make new beings of, if it were not so very cold. She gazed at the
children a moment longer, delighting to watch their little
figures,--the girl, tall for her age, graceful and agile, and so
delicately colored that she looked like a cheerful thought more
than a physical reality; while Peony expanded in breadth rather
than height, and rolled along on his short and sturdy legs as
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: anything worthy of what was already there. The tastes of the family
through long periods of time had accumulated these treasures. One
generation followed the quest of noble pictures, leaving behind it the
necessity of completing a collection still unfinished; and thus the
taste became hereditary in the family. The hundred pictures which
adorned the gallery leading from the family building to the reception-
rooms on the first floor of the front house, as well as some fifty
others placed about the salons, were the product of the patient
researches of three centuries. Among them were choice specimens of
Rubens, Ruysdael, Vandyke, Terburg, Gerard Dow, Teniers, Mieris, Paul
Potter, Wouvermans, Rembrandt, Hobbema, Cranach, and Holbein. French
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