| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them.
She wished of course--small blame to her!--to sink the whole subject;
and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now
violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from it.
I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrence--
for recurrence we took for granted--I should get used to my danger,
distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become
the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable;
and yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought
a little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: look after my house and wife and children, without knowing whether I
have any? Is nothing more needed than to get a footing, by hook or
by crook, in other people's houses to rule over the masters (and that,
perhaps, after having been brought up in all the straitness of some
seminary, and without having ever seen more of the world than may
lie within twenty or thirty leagues round), to fit one to lay down the
law rashly for chivalry, and pass judgment on knights-errant? Is it,
haply, an idle occupation, or is the time ill-spent that is spent in
roaming the world in quest, not of its enjoyments, but of those
arduous toils whereby the good mount upwards to the abodes of
everlasting life? If gentlemen, great lords, nobles, men of high
Don Quixote |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts from the
roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. The
hills, however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare,
with cliffy battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and
the Tarn still rattled through the stones with a mountain noise. I
had been led, by bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a
horrific country after the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes
it seemed smiling and plentiful, as the weather still gave an
impression of high summer to my Scottish body; although the
chestnuts were already picked out by the autumn, and the poplars,
that here began to mingle with them, had turned into pale gold
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