| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: several things besides the consciousness of his own pleasure.
He saw that Gordon looked well and happy, but that he
looked older, too, and more serious, more marked by life.
He looked as if something had happened to him--as, in fact,
something had. Bernard saw a latent spark in his friend's eye
that seemed to question his own for an impression of Blanche--
to question it eagerly, and yet to deprecate judgment.
He saw, too--with the fact made more vivid by Gordon's
standing there beside her in his manly sincerity and throwing
it into contrast--that Blanche was the same little posturing
coquette of a Blanche whom, at Baden, he would have treated it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: mind, if not her heart, was fixed upon him still, and that she was
intent upon obtaining another interview: for though, in compliance
with her mother's request, I was now constituted the companion of
her rambles for a time, she still persisted in wandering in the
fields and lanes that lay in the nearest proximity to the road;
and, whether she talked to me or read the book she carried in her
hand, she kept continually pausing to look round her, or gaze up
the road to see if anyone was coming; and if a horseman trotted by,
I could tell by her unqualified abuse of the poor equestrian,
whoever he might be, that she hated him BECAUSE he was not Mr.
Hatfield.
Agnes Grey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: will be vices, and your virtues crime.
"If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he
reappears on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured
the present at the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will
die. Stumble, and you fall! Invent anything of any kind and claim
your rights, you will be crotchety, cunning, ill-disposed to
rising younger men.
"So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I
believe still less in man. But do not you know in me another
Desplein, altogether different from the Desplein whom every one
abuses?--However, we will not stir that mud-heap.
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