| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: would come before sunset, whether it would come before he died?
He wanted to live only long enough to be able to forget, and the
tenacity of his memory filled him with dread and horror of death;
for should it come before he could accomplish the purpose of his
life he would have to remember for ever! He also longed for
loneliness. He wanted to be alone. But he was not. In the dim
light of the rooms with their closed shutters, in the bright
sunshine of the verandah, wherever he went, whichever way he
turned, he saw the small figure of a little maiden with pretty
olive face, with long black hair, her little pink robe slipping
off her shoulders, her big eyes looking up at him in the tender
Almayer's Folly |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen: Suddenly they stopped before a little house, which looked very miserable. The
roof reached to the ground; and the door was so low, that the family were
obliged to creep upon their stomachs when they went in or out. Nobody was at
home except an old Lapland woman, who was dressing fish by the light of an oil
lamp. And the Reindeer told her the whole of Gerda's history, but first of all
his own; for that seemed to him of much greater importance. Gerda was so
chilled that she could not speak.
"Poor thing," said the Lapland woman, "you have far to run still. You have
more than a hundred miles to go before you get to Finland; there the Snow
Queen has her country-house, and burns blue lights every evening. I will give
you a few words from me, which I will write on a dried haberdine, for paper I
Fairy Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love.
And why he so spake, he knew not.
And when he had finished his word the people wept, and the Priest
went back to the sacristy, and his eyes were full of tears. And
the deacons came in and began to unrobe him, and took from him the
alb and the girdle, the maniple and the stole. And he stood as one
in a dream.
And after that they had unrobed him, he looked at them and said,
'What are the flowers that stand on the altar, and whence do they
come?'
And they answered him, 'What flowers they are we cannot tell, but
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