| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: have you abandoned us to unjust and wicked surmises, and the whole city
to bereavement and endless sorrow?" and that he made answer, "It
pleased the gods, O Proculus, that we, who came from them, should remain
so long a time amongst men as we did; and, having built a city to be the
greatest in the world for empire and glory, should again return to
heaven. But farewell; and tell the Romans, that, by the exercise of
temperance and fortitude, they shall attain the height of human power;
we will be to you the propitious god Quirinus." This seemed credible to
the Romans, upon the honesty and oath of the relater, and indeed, too,
there mingled with it a certain divine passion, some preternatural
influence similar to possession by a divinity; nobody contradicted it,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: by the door as if to look at me; then--as if to share them--
came to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair.
We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt,
to be with me.
XXI
Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened
to Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news.
Flora was so markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand;
she had passed a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above
all by fears that had for their subject not in the least her former,
but wholly her present, governess. It was not against the possible
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: old maid, who was all eyes, and followed the great and notable changes
which were taking place in the person of this badly hanged man, pulled
the surgeon by the sleeve, and pointing out to him, by a curious
glance of the eye, the piteous cause, said to him--
"Will he for the future be always like that?"
"Often," replied the veracious surgeon.
"Oh! he was much nicer hanged!"
At this speech the king burst out laughing. Seeing him at the window,
the woman and the surgeon were much frightened, for this laugh seemed
to them a second sentence of death for their poor victim. But the king
kept his word, and married them. And in order to do justice he gave
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
