| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: curve of the young moon dropping to the edge of the
hills. Through the darkness she saw one or two figures
moving down the road; but the evening was too cold for
loitering, and presently the strollers disappeared.
Lamps were beginning to show here and there in the
windows. A bar of light brought out the whiteness of a
clump of lilies in the Hawes's yard: and farther down
the street Carrick Fry's Rochester lamp cast its bold
illumination on the rustic flower-tub in the middle of
his grass-plot.
For a long time she continued to lean in the window.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,
came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding
gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and
came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as
the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another
fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the
short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms
seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies,
the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so
striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs
McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked
To the Lighthouse |
