| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: If my Readers have followed me with any attention up to this point,
they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull
in Flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles,
conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which
are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny
that the strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems
of Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving
the opportunity of immediate verification, imparts to our existence
a zest which you in Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now
from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life
with us is dull; aesthetically and artistically, very dull indeed.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: longer. Instead he drew from his pocket an old
pipe and a paper of tobacco. He filled his pipe
with care -- tobacco was precious; then he began to
smoke, but his face now looked old and brooding
through the rank blue vapor. Winter was coming,
and he had not a shelter. He had not money enough
to keep him long from starvation. He knew not
how to obtain employment. He thought vaguely of
wood-piles, of cutting winter fuel for people. His
mind traveled in a trite strain of reasoning. Some-
how wood-piles seemed the only available tasks for
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: there, it shone with the mysterious brilliancy of a flower blooming
beneath the water of the sea when the sun is penetrating it. Veronique
was changed for a few moments; the Little Virgin reappeared and then
disappeared again, like a celestial vision. The pupils of her eyes,
gifted with the power of great expansion, widened until they covered
the whole surface of the blue iris except for a tiny circle. Thus the
metamorphose of the eye, which became as keen and vivid as that of an
eagle, completed the extraordinary change in the face. Was it the
storm of restrained passions; was it some power coming from the depths
of the soul, which enlarged the pupils in full daylight as they
sometimes in other eyes enlarge by night, darkening the azure of those
|
