| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: in spite of their clumsy build, as quick and active as polo
ponies, and are the only beasts I know of capable of leaping into
full speed ahead from a recumbent position. In thorn scrub they
are the worst, for there, no matter how alert the traveller may
hold himself, he is likely to come around a bush smack on one.
And a dozen times a day the throat-stopping, abrupt crash and
smash to right or left brings him up all standing, his heart
racing, the blood pounding through his veins. It is jumpy work,
and is very hard on the temper. In the natural reaction from
being startled into fits one snaps back to profanity. The
cumulative effects of the epithets hurled after a departing and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: of retrospective vision, or by the mystery of a palingenesis not
unlike the power a man might have of detecting in the form,
integument, and embryo in a seed, the flowers of the past, and the
numberless variations of their color, scent, and shape; and sometimes,
again, it could be seen vaguely foreseeing the future, either by its
apprehension of final causes, or by some phenomenon of physical
presentiment.
Other men, less poetically religious, cold, and argumentative--quacks
perhaps, but enthusiasts in brain at least, if not in heart--
recognizing some isolated examples of such phenomena, admitted their
truth while refusing to consider them as radiating from a common
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton: bramble clinging to his mud-spattered clothes, the scent of
the night about him and its chill on his pale bright face,
he really had the look of a young faun strayed in from the
forest.
Effie abandoned the terrier to fly to him. "Oh, Owen, where
in the world have you been? I walked miles and miles with
Nurse and couldn't find you, and we met Jean and he said he
didn't know where you'd gone."
"Nobody knows where I go, or what I see when I get there--
that's the beauty of it!" he laughed back at her. "But if
you're good," he added, "I'll tell you about it one of these
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