| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: The Wind
A wind is blowing over my soul,
I hear it cry the whole night through --
Is there no peace for me on earth
Except with you?
Alas, the wind has made me wise,
Over my naked soul it blew, --
There is no peace for me on earth
Even with you.
Morning
I went out on an April morning
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as
if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay
somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are
sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may,
we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid
greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
swaths--Starbuck!"
But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen
away.
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: face must, indeed, have been jaundiced when you wrote me those
terrible views of human life and the duty of women. Do you fancy you
will convert me to matrimony by your programme of subterranean labors?
Alas! is this then the outcome for you of our too-instructed dreams!
We left Blois all innocent, armed with the pointed shafts of
meditation, and, lo! the weapons of that purely ideal experience have
turned against your own breast! If I did not know you for the purest
and most angelic of created beings, I declare I should say that your
calculations smack of vice. What, my dear, in the interest of your
country home, you submit your pleasures to a periodic thinning, as you
do your timber. Oh! rather let me perish in all the violence of the
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