| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: sand.
"Ah, Mignonne!" cried the soldier, caressing her enthusiastically;
"we're bound together for life and death but no jokes, mind!" and he
retraced his steps.
From that time the desert seemed inhabited. It contained a being to
whom the man could talk, and whose ferocity was rendered gentle by
him, though he could not explain to himself the reason for their
strange friendship. Great as was the soldier's desire to stay upon
guard, he slept.
On awakening he could not find Mignonne; he mounted the hill, and in
the distance saw her springing toward him after the habit of these
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: wouldn't believe! The other day da Costa got the
cook to fry a steak for him--a turtle steak it was
too, not beef at all--and the fat caught or some-
thing. Young da Costa himself was telling me of
it here in this room. 'Mr. Schomberg'--says he--
'if I had let a cylinder cover blow off through the
skylight by my negligence Captain Falk couldn't
have been more savage. He frightened the cook so
that he won't put anything on the fire for me now.'
Poor da Costa had tears in his eyes. Only try to
put yourself in his place, captain: a sensitive, gen-
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: nothing.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very
sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and
gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled
glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is
grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is
always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no
less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that
you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is
happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.
Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I
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