| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: But here, in the meantime, there seems to swim up some outline of a
new cerebral hygiene and a good time coming, when experienced
advisers shall send a man to the proper measured level for the ode,
the biography, or the religious tract; and a nook may be found
between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne shall be able to
write more continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat slower.
Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain? It is a
sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes
well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is
certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the
chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with vociferous
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was
one of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the
fire and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place
where it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted
down, though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments
when life sits lightly and our hearts are full. The loveliest scenery
is that we make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not
remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater
place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands,
sought at great cost. Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a
whole life evolved; there all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
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