| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: dazzling skin, and very red lips; she is tall and well-made; her foot
is small and slender, and she does not put it forth; her eyes, far
from being dulled like those of so many Parisian women, have a gentle
glow which becomes quite magical if, by chance, she is animated. A
soul is then divined behind that rather indefinite form. If she takes
an interest in the conversation she displays a grace which is
otherwise buried beneath the precautions of cold demeanor, and then
she is charming. She does not seek success, but she obtains it. We
find that for which we do not seek: that saying is so often true that
some day it will be turned into a proverb. It is, in fact, the moral
of this adventure, which I should not allow myself to tell if it were
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: all that fight for life.
He had several bad attacks that night and came through each one
simply because of his great will power and fighting spirit.
After each attack he would grip my hand and say, "Well, we made
it that time, didn't we, nurse?" Toward morning he asked me if
he was going to die. I could not tell him the truth. He needed
all his strength. I told him he had one chance in a thousand.
He seemed to become very strong then, and sitting bolt upright in
bed, he said: "Then I'll fight for it!" We kept him alive for
three days, and actually thought we had won when on the third day
. . .
One Basket |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: Rachel added another stone and yawned. "I don't remember," she said,
"I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea." She yawned again.
None of these people possessed any power to frighten her out here in
the dawn, and she felt perfectly familiar even with Mr. Hirst.
"My brain, on the contrary," said Hirst, "is in a condition
of abnormal activity." He sat in his favourite position with his
arms binding his legs together and his chin resting on the top
of his knees. "I see through everything--absolutely everything.
Life has no more mysteries for me." He spoke with conviction,
but did not appear to wish for an answer. Near though they sat,
and familiar though they felt, they seemed mere shadows to each other.
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