| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: branches, the ground a dizzy distance beneath me.
Snakes!--with their forked tongues, their beady eyes
and glittering scales, their hissing and their
rattling--did I not already know them far too well on
that day of my first circus when I saw the
snake-charmer lift them up?
They were old friends of mine, enemies rather, that
peopled my nights with fear.
Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted
gloom! For what eternities have I wandered through
them, a timid, hunted creature, starting at the least
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: illustrated interviews, where the unhappy stepmother--
That stepmother, it must be explained, is quite well known to
you. That is a little surprise I have prepared for you. She is
'Thomas Plantagenet,' the gifted authoress of that witty and
daring book, "A Soul Untrammelled," and quite an excellent woman
in her way,--only it is such a crooked way. Her real name is
Milton. She is a widow and a charming one, only ten years older
than Jessie, and she is always careful to dedicate her more
daring works to the 'sacred memory of my husband' to show that
there's nothing personal, you know, in the matter. Considering
her literary reputation (she was always speaking of herself as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: their Paris, so to speak; who know its physiognomy so well that they
see every wart, and pimple, and redness. To others, Paris is always
that monstrous marvel, that amazing assemblage of activities, of
schemes, of thoughts; the city of a hundred thousand tales, the head
of the universe. But to those few, Paris is sad or gay, ugly or
beautiful, living or dead; to them Paris is a creature; every man,
every fraction of a house is a lobe of the cellular tissue of that
great courtesan whose head and heart and fantastic customs they know
so well. These men are lovers of Paris; they lift their noses at such
or such a corner of a street, certain that they can see the face of a
clock; they tell a friend whose tobacco-pouch is empty, "Go down that
Ferragus |
