| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: My head was swimming. For me his confidences reached the proportions
of tragedy; at the sight of that white head of his and beyond it the
black water in the trenches of the Bastille lying still as a canal in
Venice, I had no words to answer him. Facino Cane thought, no doubt,
that I judged him, as the rest had done, with a disdainful pity; his
gesture expressed the whole philosophy of despair.
Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of /Super flumina Babylonis/. Tears
filled my eyes. Any belated persons walking along the Boulevard
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: the iron in its flank, heaving up its head with bared teeth, the
throat vibrating to the long, indrawn snarl of wrath.
Thus the forenoon passed, while the people, their bulk growing
hourly vaster, kept to the streets, moving slowly backward and
forward, oscillating in the grooves of the thoroughfares, the
steady, low-pitched growl rising continually into the hot, still
air.
Then, at length, about twelve o'clock, the movement of the throng
assumed definite direction. It set towards the Opera House.
Presley, who had left his pony at the City livery stable, found
himself caught in the current and carried slowly forward in its
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Aesop's Fables by Aesop: of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the Boy to drop his end
of the pole. In the struggle the Donkey fell over the bridge, and
his fore-feet being tied together he was drowned.
"That will teach you," said an old man who had followed them:
"Please all, and you will please none."
The Miser and His Gold
Once upon a time there was a Miser who used to hide his gold
at the foot of a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go
and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed
this, went and dug up the gold and decamped with it. When the
Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but
Aesop's Fables |
