| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: Frenzy hurried the chaunt, frenzy rattled the drums;
The nobles, high on the terrace, greedily mouthed their thumbs;
And once and again and again, in the ignorant crowd below,
Once and again and again descended the murderous blow.
Now smoked the oven, and now, with the cutting lip of a shell,
A butcher of ninety winters jointed the bodies well.
Unto the carven lodge, silent, in order due,
The grandees of the nation one after one withdrew;
And a line of laden bearers brought to the terrace foot,
On poles across their shoulders, the last reserve of fruit.
The victims bled for the nobles in the old appointed way;
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: twopence half-penny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be
three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his
libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for
visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London
life of service was done--they did well enough here; and a photograph or
two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had
time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her and
inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: "For her whose wishes must be
obeyed" ... "The happier Helen of our days" ... disgraceful to say, she
had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage
Customs of Polynesia ("My dear, stand still," she said)--neither of those
To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: As a shade from the wing of some great bird obscene
In a wide silent land may be suddenly seen,
Darkening over the sands, where it startles and scares
Some traveller stray'd in the waste unawares,
So that thought more than once darken'd over his heart
For a moment, and rapidly seem'd to depart.
Fast and furious he rode through the thickets which rose
Up the shaggy hillside: and the quarrelling crows
Clang'd above him, and clustering down the dim air
Dropp'd into the dark woods. By fits here and there
Shepherd fires faintly gleam'd from the valleys. Oh, how
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