| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso: His truchmen now, and now himself, doth say,
What spoil his folk shall gain, what praise, what thank.
To him that feared, "Look up, ours is the day,"
He says, "Vile fear to bold hearts never sank,
How dareth one against an hundred fight?
Our cry, our shade, will put them all to flight."
XXV
But to the bold, "Go, hardy knight," he says,
"His prey out of this lion's paws go tear:"
To some before his thoughts the shape he lays,
And makes therein the image true appear,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: relation to the world without had been entirely changed with the
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
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Preludes
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
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