| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: "All-seeing sun, and thou, Ausonian soil,
For which I have sustain'd so long a toil,
Thou, King of Heav'n, and thou, the Queen of Air,
Propitious now, and reconcil'd by pray'r;
Thou, God of War, whose unresisted sway
The labors and events of arms obey;
Ye living fountains, and ye running floods,
All pow'rs of ocean, all ethereal gods,
Hear, and bear record: if I fall in field,
Or, recreant in the fight, to Turnus yield,
My Trojans shall encrease Evander's town;
Aeneid |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: destiny, who knew? and begin again light-heartedly. From
that chief peak of the hills, that now and then, like an
uplifted finger, shone in an arrow of sunlight through the
broken clouds, the shepherd in clear weather might perceive
the shining of the sea. There, he thought, was hope. But
his heart failed him when he saw the Squire; and he remained.
His fate was not that of the voyager by sea and land; he was
to travel in the spirit, and begin his journey sooner than he
supposed.
For it chanced one day that his walk led him into a portion
of the uplands which was almost unknown to him. Scrambling
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: for want of a better name, we are wont to call "fatality," that drew
him to Mme. de Beauseant.
The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly before him
with gracious thronging associations. She was a new world for him, a
world of fears and hopes, a world to fight for and to conquer.
Inevitably he felt the contrast between this vision and the human
beings in the shabby room; and then, in truth, she was a woman; what
woman had he seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation
replaced thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried
formality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming to be
received or to pass current? The sound of Mme. de Beauseant's name
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