| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: fervour; and getting somehow or other out of the apartment
and from the circle of that radiant sorceress, he found
himself in the strange out-of-doors, beholding dull houses,
wondering at dull passers-by, a fallen angel. She had smiled
upon him as he left, and with how significant, how beautiful
a smile! The memory lingered in his heart; and when he found
his way to a certain restaurant where music was performed,
flutes (as it were of Paradise) accompanied his meal. The
strings went to the melody of that parting smile; they
paraphrased and glossed it in the sense that he desired; and
for the first time in his plain and somewhat dreary life, he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: Mahomet has contriv'd matters well for his successors; for as the
Grand Signior has now a great many fine women, he will then have
as many fine young gentelmen, at his devotion.
These are surprizing scenes; but I beg leave to affirm, that the
solemn operations of nature are subjects of contemplation, not of
ridicule. Therefore I make it my earnest request to the merry
fellows, and giggling girls about town, that they would not put
themselves in a high twitter, when they go to visit a general
lying-in of his first child; his officers serving as midwives,
nurses and rockers dispensing caudle; or if they behold the
reverend prelates dressing the heads and airing the linnen at
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: could not repress the bitter reflections suggested to him by the
assumption of his title.
"What a mockery of fortune! A prince--with fifteen hundred francs a
year! Master of one of the finest palaces in the world, and unable to
sell the statues, stairs, paintings, sculpture, which an Austrian
decree had made inalienable! To live on a foundation of piles of
campeachy wood worth nearly a million of francs, and have no
furniture! To own sumptuous galleries, and live in an attic above the
topmost arabesque cornice constructed of marble brought from the Morea
--the land which a Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time
of the Romans! To see his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of
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