| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey: before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body
one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting
veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he
had begun to rest.
Rest came to him that night, but no sleep. Sleep he did not want.
The hours of strained effort were now as if they had never been,
and he wanted to think. Earlier in the day he had dismissed an
inexplicable feeling of change; but now, when there was no longer
demand on his cunning and strength and he had time to think, he
could not catch the illusive thing that had sadly perplexed as
well as elevated his spirit.
Riders of the Purple Sage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: a tug at the reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been
pierced as it were by a thread of green fire, suddenly lighting
their confusion and falling into the field to my left. It was
the third falling star!
Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast,
danced out the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the
thunder burst like a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit
between his teeth and bolted.
A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill,
and down this we clattered. Once the lightning had begun,
it went on in as rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever
War of the Worlds |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the
scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself
dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver;
she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she
sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to
"spirit," the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a
little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of THEIR common,
their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She
made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that
people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the
boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public
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