| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it.
There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great
hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that
this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of
its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known
of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but
will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul
and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with
death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no
perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: Something was certainly to be concealed; her fancy,
though it had trespassed lately once or twice,
could not mislead her here; and what that something was,
a short sentence of Miss Tilney's, as they followed
the general at some distance downstairs, seemed to point
out: "I was going to take you into what was my mother's
room--the room in which she died--" were all her words;
but few as they were, they conveyed pages of intelligence
to Catherine. It was no wonder that the general should
shrink from the sight of such objects as that room
must contain; a room in all probability never entered
Northanger Abbey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: always come now, you know," the thing he was there for seemed
already to have happened. He asked her if it was the death of her
aunt that made the difference; to which she replied: "She never
knew I knew you. I wished her not to." The beautiful clearness of
her candour - her faded beauty was like a summer twilight -
disconnected the words from any image of deceit. They might have
struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had
always given him a sense of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was
present, as he looked about him, in the small complacencies of the
room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we
know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself not
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