The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: The door shut and Terence walked across to the window. He leant
his forehead against the pane.
"Rachel," he repeated to himself. "She has a chance of life. Rachel."
How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any one yesterday
seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They had been engaged
for four weeks. A fortnight ago she had been perfectly well.
What could fourteen days have done to bring her from that state to this?
To realise what they meant by saying that she had a chance of life
was beyond him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned,
still enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards the door.
Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the garden, and the trees
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: taciturn, and when they talk it is only about Spain, Vienna, Italy, or
Petersburg. Names of countries act like springs in their mind; press
them, and the ringing of their changes begins.
"That Madame Firmiani sees a great deal of the faubourg Saint-Germain,
doesn't she?" This from a person who desires to belong to the class
Distinguished. She gives the "de" to everybody,--to Monsieur Dupin
senior, to Monsieur Lafayette; she flings it right and left and
humiliates many. This woman spends her life in striving to know and do
"the right thing"; but, for her sins, she lives in a the Marais, and
her husband is a lawyer,--a lawyer before the Royal courts, however.
"Madame Firmiani, monsieur? I do not know her." This man belongs to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: walked round outside every day, peeping just over the top of the
ice wall, to see that all went right; and now and then he played
conjuring tricks, or had an exhibition of fireworks, to amuse the
ice-fairies. For he would make himself into four or five suns at
once, or paint the sky with rings and crosses and crescents of
white fire, and stick himself in the middle of them, and wink at
the fairies; and I daresay they were very much amused; for
anything's fun in the country.
And there the good whales lay, the happy sleepy beasts, upon the
still oily sea. They were all right whales, you must know, and
finners, and razor-backs, and bottle-noses, and spotted sea-
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