| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.
Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.
Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness.
Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . .
What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: Fritz escaped that truly Christian trap by saying, "I asked you first."
It grew so confusing that I slipped in front of Frau Kellermann--and walked
in the peaceful knowledge that she was blossoming and I was under no
obligation to inform even my nearest and dearest as to the precise capacity
of my affections. "What right have they to ask each other such questions
the day after letters of blessing have been received?" I reflected. "What
right have they even to question each other? Love which becomes engaged
and married is a purely affirmative affair--they are usurping the
privileges of their betters and wisers!"
The edges of the field frilled over into an immense pine forest--very
pleasant and cool it looked. Another signpost begged us to keep to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: it is to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling.
Here, not one of all the thousand heart ties that bind child and
mother had been broken. The three were alone in the world; they lived
one life, a life of close sympathy. If Mme. Willemsens was silent in
the morning, Louis and Marie would not speak, respecting everything in
her, even those thoughts which they did not share. But the older boy,
with a precocious power of thought, would not rest satisfied with his
mother's assertion that she was perfectly well. He scanned her face
with uneasy forebodings; the exact danger he did not know, but dimly
he felt it threatening in those purple rings about her eyes, in the
deepening hollows under them, and the feverish red that deepened in
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