| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: the mortifications of it more than she foresaw, and to Sir Walter's
feelings they must have been dreadful. And with regard to Anne's
dislike of Bath, she considered it as a prejudice and mistake arising,
first, from the circumstance of her having been three years
at school there, after her mother's death; and secondly,
from her happening to be not in perfectly good spirits the only winter
which she had afterwards spent there with herself.
Lady Russell was fond of Bath, in short, and disposed to think
it must suit them all; and as to her young friend's health,
by passing all the warm months with her at Kellynch Lodge,
every danger would be avoided; and it was in fact, a change which must
Persuasion |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: that was his visitation. So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror,
while the pieces fitted and fitted. So SHE had seen it while he
didn't, and so she served at this hour to drive the truth home. It
was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had
waited the wait was itself his portion. This the companion of his
vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then offered him
the chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was never
baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had
seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him.
The escape would have been to love her; then, THEN he would have
lived. SHE had lived--who could say now with what passion?--since
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.
Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated
quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the
immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests. And
the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented
inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the
companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the imagination
vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;
others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets
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