| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: place of many rough-cast gables and grey roofs. It had something
the air of a rambling infinitesimal cathedral, the body of it
rising in the midst two storeys high, with a steep-pitched roof,
and sending out upon all hands (as it were chapter-houses, chapels,
and transepts) one-storeyed and dwarfish projections. To add to
this appearance, it was grotesquely decorated with crockets and
gargoyles, ravished from some medieval church. The place seemed
hidden away, being not only concealed in the trees of the garden,
but, on the side on which I approached it, buried as high as the
eaves by the rising of the ground. About the walls of the garden
there went a line of well-grown elms and beeches, the first
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: river widens out before you at every step as you climb to the house.
At the end you come to a second gateway, a Gothic archway covered with
simple ornament, now crumbling into ruin and overgrown with
wildflowers--moss and ivy, wallflowers and pellitory. Every stone wall
on the hillside is decked with this ineradicable plant-life, which
springs up along the cracks afresh with new wreaths for every time of
year.
The worm-eaten gate gives into a little garden, a strip of turf, a few
trees, and a wilderness of flowers and rose bushes--a garden won from
the rock on the highest terrace of all, with the dark, old balustrade
along its edge. Opposite the gateway, a wooden summer-house stands
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Egmont by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: as beasts and monsters; looks around for fire and sword, and imagines that
by such means human beings are subdued.
Machiavel. You appear to me too vehement; you take the matter too
seriously. Do you not remain Regent?
Regent. I am aware of that. He will bring his instructions. I am old enough
in state affairs to understand how people can be supplanted, without being
actually deprived of office. First, he will produce a commission, couched
in terms somewhat obscure and equivocal; he will stretch his authority, for
the power is in his hands; if I complain, he will hint at secret instructions;
if I desire to see them, he will answer evasively; if I insist, he will produce
a paper of totally different import; and if this fail to satisfy me, he will go
Egmont |
