| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: When I got up I seemed to walk, to crawl, with leaden weights
holding back my feet.
When I got to the corner I had to catch the post for support. I
knew somebody was saying, "Oh, how terrible!" over and over. It
was only afterward that I knew it had been myself. And then some
other voice was saying, "Don't be alarmed. Please don't be
frightened. I'm all right."
I dared to look over the parapet, finally, and instead of a
crushed and unspeakable body, there was Mr. Harbison, sitting
about eight feet below me, with his feet swinging into space and
a long red scratch from the corner of his eye across his cheek.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: he mentioned that Madame de Dey, in spite of her illness, would
receive her friends that evening. Matching his own craft against those
wily Norman minds, he replied to the questions put to him on the
nature of Madame de Dey's illness in a manner that hoodwinked the
community. He related to a gouty old dame, that Madame de Dey had
almost died of a sudden attack of gout in the stomach, but had been
relieved by a remedy which the famous doctor, Tronchin, had once
recommended to her,--namely, to apply the skin of a freshly-flayed
hare on the pit of the stomach, and to remain in bed without making
the slightest movement for two days. This tale had prodigious success,
and the doctor of Carentan, a royalist "in petto," increased its
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: the following to be about the truth:--
There are several kinds of caterpillar and grub, which eat into books,
those with legs are the larvae of moths; those without legs, or rather
with rudimentary legs, are grubs and turn to beetles.
It is not known whether any species of caterpillar or grub
can live generation after generation upon books alone,
but several sorts of wood-borers, and others which live upon
vegetable refuse, will attack paper, especially if attracted
in the first place by the real wooden boards in which it was
the custom of the old book-binders to clothe their volumes.
In this belief, some country librarians object to opening the library
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