| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: the understanding of many things relating to the world of the sea
She memorized with novel delight much that was told her day by
day concerning the nature surrounding her,--many secrets of the
air, many of those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities
cannot comprehend because the atmosphere is thickened and made
stagnant above them--cannot even watch because the horizon is
hidden from their eyes by walls, and by weary avenues of trees
with whitewashed trunks. She learned, by listening, by asking,
by observing also, how to know the signs that foretell wild
weather:--tremendous sunsets, scuddings and bridgings of
cloud,--sharpening and darkening of the sea-line,--and the shriek
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed to me.
VII
Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on
political economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Would it be right? With my feet on the very shores of the sea
and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a
good-natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my
youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the last, too,
of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing anew, with
an anxious appeal to the butcher's arbitration, the relative
advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the
intrusion on them of two or three other customers, were of no
avail, for Mr. Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and
at last Ann Eliza, ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed
her steak, and walked home through the thickening snow.
Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain,
and in the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions
she wondered how she could have been foolish enough to suppose
that, even if Mr. Ramy DID go to that particular market, he
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