| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: the children grated on his ears, and the bright pitiless sunlight
mocked his sorrow, and a dull odour of strange spices, spices such
as embalmers use, seemed to taint - or was it fancy? - the clear
morning air. He buried his face in his hands, and when the Infanta
looked up again the curtains had been drawn, and the King had
retired.
She made a little MOUE of disappointment, and shrugged her
shoulders. Surely he might have stayed with her on her birthday.
What did the stupid State-affairs matter? Or had he gone to that
gloomy chapel, where the candles were always burning, and where she
was never allowed to enter? How silly of him, when the sun was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Cruise of the Jasper B. by Don Marquis: the bed, peeping out of the wardrobe, propping the windows open,
serving as paper weights; pictures, warlike and romantic prints
and engravings, pinned to the walls with daggers; in the
wardrobe, coats and hats hanging from poignards and stilettos
thrust into the wood instead of from nails or hooks. But of all
the weapons it was the rapiers, of all the books it was Dumas,
that he loved. There was Dumas in French, Dumas in English,
Dumas with pictures, Dumas unillustrated, Dumas in cloth, Dumas
in leather, Dumas in boards, Dumas in paper covers. Cleggett had
been twenty years getting these arms and books together; often he
had gone without a dinner in order to make a payment on some
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed - wonderful,
but wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men
are more like numerals than men. They must bear their
idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard
about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre.
Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest ranks of
life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability
among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among
the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very
gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new
graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at
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