| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay: gleaming brilliantly. He was lying by the side. of the old lake, but
it was now a crater, to the bottom of which his eyes could not
penetrate. The hills encircling it were torn, as if by heavy
gunfire. A few thunderclouds were floating in the air at no great
height, from which branched lightning descended to the earth
incessantly, accompanied by alarming and singular crashes.
He got on his legs, and tested his actions. Finding that he was
uninjured, he first of all viewed the crater at closer quarters, and
then started to walk painfully toward the northern shore.
When he had attained the crest above the lake, the landscape sloped
gently down for two miles to the sea. Everywhere he passed through
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: I spoke of my own renewed assault and confessed my difficulties;
whereupon he repeated his former advice: "Give it up, give it up!"
He evidently didn't think me intellectually equipped for the
adventure. I stayed half an hour, and he was most good-natured,
but I couldn't help pronouncing him a man of unstable moods. He
had been free with me in a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now
in a mood he had turned indifferent. This general levity helped me
to believe that, so far as the subject of the tip went, there
wasn't much in it. I contrived however to make him answer a few
more questions about it, though he did so with visible impatience.
For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were all so blank about was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: that have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory
propositions.... Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and
mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the curious silliness
which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung about
the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue
to fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of
codes compiled by people who lived sixteen hundred or two
thousand five hundred years ago.... the increasingly educated and
practical-minded working classes will not come to church, weekday
or Sunday."
The bishop held the paper in his hand, and with a mind that he
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