| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: '9 P.M. - A most provoking unsatisfactory day. We have done
nothing. The wind and sea have both risen. Too little notice has
been given to the telegraphists who accompany this expedition; they
had to leave all their instruments at Lyons in order to arrive at
Bona in time; our tests are therefore of the roughest, and no one
really knows where the faults are. Mr. L- in the morning lost much
time; then he told us, after we had been inactive for about eight
hours, that the fault in number three was within six miles; and at
six o'clock in the evening, when all was ready for a start to pick
up these six miles, he comes and says there must be a fault about
thirty miles from Bona! By this time it was too late to begin
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon
the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale
and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an
intensity of purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the
intolerable lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An
English painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural
anger that 'the values were all wrong.' Had he got among the Alps on
a bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: last night I could not sleep; I remembered the scenes of my childhood;
I fancied I was running in the fields. Ah! I had a future," he said,
suddenly interrupting himself; "and now, twelve men, a sub-lieutenant
shouting 'Carry-arms, aim, fire!' a roll of drums, and infamy! that's
my future now. Oh! there must be a God, or it would all be too
senseless."
Then he took me in his arms and pressed me to him with all his
strength.
"You are the last man, the last friend to whom I can show my soul. You
will be set at liberty, you will see your mother! I don't know whether
you are rich or poor, but no matter! you are all the world to me. They
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