| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: the thing possessed is seldom the thing that we dreamed of.
Beneath Melmoth's omnipotence lurked this tragical anticlimax of so
many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to
his successor, to whom infinite power brought Nothingness as a dowry.
To come to a clear understanding of Castanier's strange position, it
must be borne in mind how suddenly these revolutions of thought and
feeling had been wrought; how quickly they had succeeded each other;
and of these things it is hard to give any idea to those who have
never broken the prison bonds of time, and space, and distance. His
relation to the world without had been entirely changed with the
expansion of his faculties.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Confessio Amantis by John Gower: For no conseil, and thei therfore,
With such atyr as tho was used,
Ordeinen that it was excused,
And hid so crafteliche aboute,
That noman myhte sen hem oute.
Bot when sche was fulliche arraied
And hire atyr was al assaied,
Tho was sche foulere on to se:
Bot yit it may non other be, 1760
Thei were wedded in the nyht;
So wo begon was nevere knyht
Confessio Amantis |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: moors as she might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover in
especial fat hot dull ladies who had out with her, to exasperation,
the terms for seaside lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the
matter of the number of beds required, which was not less
portentous: this in reference to places of which the names--
Eastbourne, Folkestone, Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby--tormented her
with something of the sound of the plash of water that haunts the
traveller in the desert. She had not been out of London for a
dozen years, and the only thing to give a taste to the present dead
weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment. The sparse customers,
the people she did see, were the people who were "just off"--off on
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