| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: my sick brain that appeared to see this tropical bird in the midst
of the snow? It is Tuesday to-day; from now on I will carefully
count the days - the days that still remain to me.
"This morning I asked the old woman about the parrot. She only
smiled and her smile made me terribly afraid. The thought that this
thing which is happening to me, this thing that I took to be a crime,
may be only a necessity - the thought fills me with horror! Am I in
a prison? or is this the cell of an insane asylum? Am I the victim
of a villain? or am I really mad? My pulse is quickening, but my
memory is quite clear; I can look back over every incident in my life.
"She has just taken away my food. I asked her to bring me only eggs
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: energies of his body. When he was not instructing very young
gentlemen in the elements of the art, showing them the elaborate and
intricate salute - which with a few days' hard practice he had
mastered to perfection - and the eight guards, he was himself hard
at work on those same guards, exercising eye, wrist, and knees.
Perceiving his enthusiasm, and seeing the obvious possibilities it
opened out of turning him into a really effective assistant, M.
des Amis presently took him more seriously in hand.
"Your application and zeal, my friend, are deserving of more than
forty livres a month," the master informed him at the end of a week.
"For the present, however, I will make up what else I consider due
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: to your work in the morning, or return from it at eventide, you
have to pass through street after street of the most foolish and
stupid architecture that the world has ever seen; architecture,
where every lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled, and every
lovely Gothic form defiled and desecrated, reducing three-fourths
of the London houses to being, merely, like square boxes of the
vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they
are pretentious - the hall door always of the wrong colour, and the
windows of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the
houses you turn to contemplate the street itself, you have nothing
to look at but chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards,
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