| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: bade him rise and tell him what the trouble was. The merchant
said that his daughter, a girl of twenty-two, had fallen ill two
years ago, after her mother's sudden death. She had moaned (as
he expressed it) and since then had not been herself. And now he
had brought her fourteen hundred versts and she was waiting in
the hostelry till Father Sergius should give orders to bring her.
She did not go out during the day, being afraid of the light, and
could only come after sunset.
'Is she very weak?' asked Father Sergius.
'No, she has no particular weakness. She is quite plump, and is
only "nerastenic" the doctors say. If you will only let me bring
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: to me.
"Then, to add to the unpleasantness of my position, just after we
boarded the train - I was accompanying my sister and this young lady,
Miss West - a woman touched me on the sleeve, and I turned to face
- my wife!
"That took away my last bit of nerve. I told my sister, and you
can understand she was in a bad way, too. We knew what it meant.
Ida had heard that I was going - "
He stopped and glanced uneasily at Alison.
"Go on," she said coldly. "It is too late to shield me. The time
to have done that was when I was your guest."
The Man in Lower Ten |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: powerless against the supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had
long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but tonight she
felt she must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in
doing so--she remembered the chemist's warning. If sleep came at
all, it might be a sleep without waking. But after all that was
but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was
incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose
would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so
desperately needed....
She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely--the
physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her
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