| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who comes in sight of the
enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamour and glad keenness
of impression to everything that takes place at such moments.
On the high ground where the enemy was, the smoke of a cannon
rose, and a ball flew whistling over the heads of the hussar squadron.
The officers who had been standing together rode off to their
places. The hussars began carefully aligning their horses. Silence
fell on the whole squadron. All were looking at the enemy in front and
at the squadron commander, awaiting the word of command. A second
and a third cannon ball flew past. Evidently they were firing at the
hussars, but the balls with rapid rhythmic whistle flew over the heads
War and Peace |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: enigma. I have ransacked many mysteries, I have discovered the reason
of many natural laws, the purport of some divine hieroglyphics; of the
meaning of this dark secret I know nothing. I study it as I would the
form of an Indian weapon, the symbolic construction of which is known
only to the Brahmans. In this dread mystery the spirit of Evil is too
visibly the master; I dare not lay the blame to God. Anguish
irremediable, what power finds amusement in weaving you? Can Henriette
and her mysterious philosopher be right? Does their mysticism contain
the explanation of humanity?
The autumn leaves were falling during the last few days which I passed
in the valley, days of lowering clouds, which do sometimes obscure the
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: to be a lonely woman in a crowd that cared not for her. As she
busied herself in arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered
with leaves, for Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the
gloomy forest in the measure of a song that she had learned in
youth. The rude melody, the production of a bard who won no name,
was descriptive of a winter evening in a frontier cottage, when,
secured from savage inroad by the high-piled snow-drifts, the
family rejoiced by their own fireside. The whole song possessed
the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought, but four
continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the
blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them,
Mosses From An Old Manse |
