| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the
princess's old waitingmaid he had clambered on a shelf to reach
it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried
to reassure him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried
the holy picture and set it at Kitty's head, carefully tucking it
in behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had
happened, he could not tell. He did not understand why the old
princess took his hand, and looking compassionately at him,
begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat
something and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked
seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a drop of
Anna Karenina |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: soldiers posting themselves in deepest silence along the wall of the
house. She turned, affecting to be calm, and said to her husband:--
"You have not a minute to lose; you must escape through the garden.
Here is the key of the little gate."
As a precaution she turned to the other windows, looking on the
garden. In the shadow of the trees she saw the gleam of the silver
lace on the hats of a body of gendarmes; and she heard the distant
mutterings of a crowd of persons whom sentinels were holding back at
the end of the streets up which curiosity had drawn them. Diard had,
in truth, been seen to enter his house by persons at their windows,
and on their information and that of the frightened maid-servant, who
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: after prolonged reflection, I wrote long, boring letters which I
might just as well not have written. And yet I took a father's
place with her and loved her like a daughter!
Now Katya is living less than half a mile off. She has taken a
flat of five rooms, and has installed herself fairly comfortably
and in the taste of the day. If any one were to undertake to
describe her surroundings, the most characteristic note in the
picture would be indolence. For the indolent body there are soft
lounges, soft stools; for indolent feet soft rugs; for indolent
eyes faded, dingy, or flat colours; for the indolent soul the
walls are hung with a number of cheap fans and trivial pictures,
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