| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: I was filled with rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very
day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed
away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king
wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I
entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly
in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true
secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them
with my own pain. Now I feel quite differently. I see it would be
both ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when
my friends came to see me they would have to make their faces still
longer in order to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: them after half a dozen visits--arrived to perform the offices of
chambermaid and valet. The floor of the apartment was scrubbed,
the urns refilled with oil, and the skin cover of the granite couch
was changed. It seemed that another belief--in cleanliness--had
refused to be dislodged from the Inca breast.
When I managed, by dint of violent and expressive gestures, to
convey to our valet the idea that we desired a bath, he led us down
the corridor some two hundred feet to a stream of cool running
water. We took advantage of the opportunity to scrub our clothing,
which was sadly in need of the operation.
I had early made an examination of the urns which furnished
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: "Yes, ever so far away--to the other end of London. There are all
sorts of reasons I can't tell you; and it's practically settled.
It's better for me, much; and I've only kept on at Cocker's for
YOU."
"For me?"
Making out in the dusk that he fairly blushed, she now measured how
far he had been from knowing too much. Too much, she called it at
present; and that was easy, since it proved so abundantly enough
for her that he should simply be where he was. "As we shall never
talk this way but to-night--never, never again!--here it all is.
I'll say it; I don't care what you think; it doesn't matter; I only
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