| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: Mademoiselle Gamard enjoyed the pleasure of being pitied by friends
who, without really thinking one word of what they said, kept
repeating to her: "How COULD he have turned against you?--so kind and
gentle as you are!" or, "Console yourself, dear Mademoiselle Gamard,
you are so well known that--" et cetera.
Nevertheless, these friends, enchanted to escape one evening a week in
the Cloister, the darkest, dreariest, and most out of the way corner
in Tours, blessed the poor vicar in their hearts.
Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or
love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each
other more and more. The Abbe Birotteau soon became intolerable to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: a garden out there, with stars overhead, where
I used to walk at night when I had a single
purpose and a single heart. I can remember
how I used to feel there, how beautiful
everything about me was, and what life and
power and freedom I felt in myself. When the
window opens I know exactly how it would
feel to be out there. But that garden is closed
to me. How is it, I ask myself, that everything
can be so different with me when nothing here
has changed? I am in my own house, in my own study, in the
Alexander's Bridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: Paraday by letter, you know."
"Yes, but he doesn't answer. I've written three times."
"Very true," I reflected; "the sort of letter you mean goes
straight into the fire."
"How do you know the sort I mean?" My interlocutress had blushed
and smiled, and in a moment she added: "I don't believe he gets
many like them!"
"I'm sure they're beautiful, but he burns without reading." I
didn't add that I had convinced him he ought to.
"Isn't he then in danger of burning things of importance?"
"He would perhaps be so if distinguished men hadn't an infallible
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