| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: should move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed
above her. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again several
more hours had passed, but the night still lasted interminably.
The woman was still playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel
under a river, and the light stood in a little archway in the wall
above her. She cried "Terence!" and the peaked shadow again moved
across the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow movement rose,
and they both stood still above her.
"It's just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep
Mr. Forrest in bed," the woman said, "and he was such a tall gentleman."
In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel again
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: travel often over the various creeks in order to decide which
claims should lapse and which should be retained. A quartz miner
himself in his early youth, before coming to Alaska, he dreamed
of finding the mother-lode. A placer camp he knew was ephemeral,
while a quartz camp abided, and he kept a score of men in the
quest for months. The mother-lode was never found, and, years
afterward, he estimated that the search for it had cost him fifty
thousand dollars.
But he was playing big. Heavy as were his expenses, he won more
heavily. He took lays, bought half shares, shared with the men
he grub-staked, and made personal locations. Day and night his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: perhaps a greater consolation, in this little nosegay on the grave of
one who had died old. We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of
death, and think so little of the enduring tragedy of some men's
lives, that we see more to lament for in a life cut off in the midst
of usefulness and love, than in one that miserably survives all love
and usefulness, and goes about the world the phantom of itself,
without hope, or joy, or any consolation. These flowers seemed not
so much the token of love that survived death, as of something yet
more beautiful - of love that had lived a man's life out to an end
with him, and been faithful and companionable, and not weary of
loving, throughout all these years.
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