| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: poured into her heart gradually abated; and one day, when she heard
her child say 'Father,' a word that she had not taught him, she
forgave my crime. But sorrow and weeping and days and nights of
ceaseless toil injured her health. Religion had brought its
consolations and the courage to bear the ills of life, but all too
late. She fell ill of a heart complaint brought on by grief and by the
strain of expectation, for she always thought that I should return,
and her hopes always sprang up afresh after every disappointment. Her
health grew worse; and at last, as she was lying on her deathbed, she
wrote those few lines, containing no word of reproach, prompted by
religion, and by a belief in the goodness in my nature. She knew, she
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: We had looked so long for clothed folk that it was the
white clothes he thought of. The same with their faces--
he could not tell about them--he thought they were fair.
Suddenly, it seemed, Pan had fallen upon him and put him
forth in terror. He had turned and raced through the
forest, here to the sea. He did not think the white-clad
men had seen him.
We took him to the Admiral who listened, then brought
his hands together. ``Hath it not--hath it not, I ask you
--sound of Prester John?''
With the dawn he had men ashore, and there he went
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: half up in his seat, as though he had been familiarly touched on the
shoulder. He glanced back with apprehension; his aged follower
whispered inaudibly at his ear; the chiefs turned their eyes away in
silence, for the old wizard, the man who could command ghosts and send
evil spirits against enemies, was speaking low to their ruler. Around
the short stillness of the open place the trees rustled faintly, the
soft laughter of girls playing with the flowers rose in clear bursts
of joyous sound. At the end of upright spear-shafts the long tufts of
dyed horse-hair waved crimson and filmy in the gust of wind; and
beyond the blaze of hedges the brook of limpid quick water ran
invisible and loud under the drooping grass of the bank, with a great
Tales of Unrest |
