| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big
Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of
information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint
air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have
been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut
Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an
unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place
was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been
used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself,
it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's
1984 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: "You surely don't find me heavy? What nonsense!"
I thought of the day when he had given me a bad time at riding
in the woods as a boy, and kept asking, "You're not tired?"
Another time during the same illness he wanted me to carry him
down-stairs in my arms by the winding stone staircase.
"Pick me up as they do a baby and carry me."
He had not a grain of fear that I might stumble and kill him.
It was all I could do to insist on his being carried down in an
arm-chair by three of us.
Was my father afraid of death?
It is impossible to answer the question in one word. With his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of the day.
Through the windows there came already a flush of dawn. The
thing, composed of wood, and cords, and wheels, and pulleys, was
more faithful in its service than he in his duty to Bartolommeo--
he, a man with that peculiar piece of human mechanism within him
that we call a heart.
Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret drawer in
the Gothic table--he meant to run no more risks of losing the
mysterious liquid.
Even at that solemn moment he heard the murmur of a crowd in the
gallery, a confused sound of voices, of stifled laughter and
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