| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: as well or better than their own mother---that's true. They used
to call her "little mamma." These children made her a shade
livelier, but she was not the girl she had been--I could see that--
and she grew thinner a good deal. Well, my lord got to ask the
Swancourts oftener and oftener to dinner--nobody else of his
acquaintance--and at last the vicar's family were backwards and
forwards at all hours of the day. Well, people say that the
little girls asked their father to let Miss Elfride come and live
with them, and that he said perhaps he would if they were good
children. However, the time went on, and one day I said, "Miss
Elfride, you don't look so well as you used to; and though nobody
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: life, at any moment and in any view, is as dangerous as a sinking
ship; and yet it is man's handsome fashion to carry umbrellas, to
wear indiarubber over-shoes, to begin vast works, and to conduct
himself in every way as if he might hope to be eternal. And for my
own poor part I should despise the man who, even on board a sinking
ship, should omit to take a pill or to wind up his watch. That, my
friend, would not be the human attitude."
"I beg pardon, sir," said Mr. Spoker. "But what is precisely the
difference between shaving in a sinking ship and smoking in a
powder magazine?"
"Or doing anything at all in any conceivable circumstances?" cried
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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: and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.
And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage
corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in
the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if
with conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint,
has countersigned the picture. After your farthest wandering, you
are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway,
to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the
aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush. It is not a
wilderness; it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre
of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the midst, a little
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