| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time
somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it; and
she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished
contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased at
this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the
work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste.
I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my
share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed
their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than
formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: young fellow, apparently in somewhat better circumstances, who
came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my
reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of
age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh
air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach
was lumbering along,--these things, together with an
indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of
those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with
the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was
no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck
was already suffocating him and kept the water from his
lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river! -- the
idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the
darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant,
how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became
fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it
began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising
toward the surface -- knew it with reluctance, for he was now
very comfortable. "To be hanged and drowned," he thought,
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
