| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.
And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.
'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: the metal was of burnished silver.
Sleep ruled everywhere, and the homestead was not less quiet than the
solitary plain.
In the farmhouse, on her great wooden bedstead, Tant Sannie, the Boer-
woman, rolled heavily in her sleep.
She had gone to bed, as she always did, in her clothes, and the night was
warm and the room close, and she dreamed bad dreams. Not of the ghosts and
devils that so haunted her waking thoughts; not of her second husband the
consumptive Englishman, whose grave lay away beyond the ostrich-camps, nor
of her first, the young Boer; but only of the sheep's trotters she had
eaten for supper that night. She dreamed that one stuck fast in her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: cravat added to the martial appearance of this six-foot mystery, with
eyes of jet and Italian fervor. The amplitude of his pleated trousers,
which allowed only the tips of his boots to be seen, revealed his
faithfulness to the fashions of his own land. There was something
really burlesque to a romantic woman in the striking contrast no one
could fail to remark between the captain and the count, the little
Pole with his pinched face and the stalwart soldier.
"Good morning, Adam," he said familiarly. Then he bowed courteously as
he asked Clementine what he could do for her.
"You are Laginski's friend!" exclaimed the countess.
"For life and death," answered Paz, to whom the count threw a smile of
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