The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: written in his stars. When will he turn his last somersault and
stand on his feet at last?"
Turgénieff was just the same about my father's
"Confession," which he read not long before his death. Having
promised to read it, "to try to understand it," and "not to lose my
temper," he "started to write a long letter in answer to the
'Confession,' but never finished it . . . for fear of becoming
disputatious."
In a letter to D. V. Grigórevitch he called the book,
which was based, in his opinion, on false premises, "a denial of
all live human life" and "a new sort of Nihilism."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from King James Bible: generations, after their families, by the house of their fathers,
according to the number of the names, by their polls, every male from
twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war;
NUM 1:21 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe of Reuben,
were forty and six thousand and five hundred.
NUM 1:22 Of the children of Simeon, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, those that were numbered of
them, according to the number of the names, by their polls, every male
from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war;
NUM 1:23 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe of Simeon,
were fifty and nine thousand and three hundred.
 King James Bible |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature.
My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
character. He was determined that I should be a great
mathematician or a scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I
inherited from him and also from my mother (who wrote some lovely
Bengali lyrics in her youth) proved stronger. One day, when I
was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in algebra: it WOULDN'T come
right; but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it
down.
"From that day my 'poetic career' began. At thirteen I wrote a
long poem a la 'Lady of the Lake'--1300 lines in six days. At
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