| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: he cast its lights on what he had found, exclaiming immediately,
"Why, it is a child!"
The child still breathed, but so very feebly that Harry expected
it to cease every instant. Not a moment was to be lost;
he must carry this poor little creature out of the pit,
and take it home to his mother as quickly as he could. He
eagerly fastened the cord round his waist, stuck on his lamp,
clasped the child to his breast with his left arm, and, keeping his
right hand free to hold the knife, he gave the signal agreed on,
to have the rope pulled up.
It tightened at once; he began the ascent. Harry looked around him
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: would have wanted to treat me. But in us there was nothing
requiring treatment. All this mental malady was the simple
result of the fact that we were living immorally. Thanks to this
immoral life, we suffered, and, to stifle our sufferings, we
tried abnormal means, which the doctors call the 'symptoms' of a
mental malady,--hysteria.
"There was no occasion in all this to apply for treatment to
Charcot or to anybody else. Neither suggestion nor bromide would
have been effective in working our cure. The needful thing was
an examination of the origin of the evil. It is as when one is
sitting on a nail; if you see the nail, you see that which is
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: expansion of his faculties.
Like Melmoth himself, Castanier could travel in a few moments over the
fertile plains of India, could soar on the wings of demons above
African desert spaces, or skim the surface of the seas. The same
insight that could read the inmost thoughts of others, could apprehend
at a glance the nature of any material object, just as he caught as it
were all flavors at once upon his tongue. He took his pleasure like a
despot; a blow of the axe felled the tree that he might eat its
fruits. The transitions, the alternations that measure joy and pain,
and diversify human happiness, no longer existed for him. He had so
completely glutted his appetites that pleasure must overpass the
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