| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: that spot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege.
He'd stand before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and
flapping mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears. Then the
thirst would come on him and he'd ramp round and roar till the
earth shook, calling me every name he could lay tongue to. This
was to frighten me, of course; and when he thought I was
sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and try to make a
sneak for the creek. Sometimes I'd let him get almost there--only
a couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and back
he'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was. After
I'd done this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: He shook himself and began to read the letter.
"Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are
laid up. Burn this as soon as you've read it. Louis Bassett has
started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person we
discussed out of town as soon as possible. Bassett is up to
mischief. I'm not signing this fully, for obvious reasons. G."
XVII
The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather
low white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family
exodus to the Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out
over the terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the
The Breaking Point |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: that word, derived from a very distinguished etymologist who wishes
his name kept secret.
"Burgundian" is the name given, since the reign of Charles VI., to
those noisy detonations, the result of which is to fling upon the
carpet or the clothes a little coal or ember, the trifling nucleus of
a conflagration. Heat or fire releases, they say, a bubble of air left
in the heart of the wood by a gnawing worm. "Inde amor, inde
burgundus." We tremble when we see the structure we had so carefully
erected between the logs rolling down like an avalanche. Oh! to build
and stir and play with fire when we love is the material development
of our thoughts.
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