| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: The pencil meets its shadow upon clear paper,
Voices are raised, a door is slammed. The lovers,
Murmuring in an adjacent room, grow silent,
The eaves make liquid music. . . .Hours have passed,
And nothing changes, and everything is changed.
Exultation is dead, Beauty is harlot,--
And walks the streets. The thing I strongly seized
Has turned to darkness, and darkness rides my heart.
If you could solve this darkness you would have me.
This causeless melancholy that comes with rain,
Or on such days as this when large wet snowflakes
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: cell as they did, stretching himself as though he had been
sleeping. Dennis sat upon a bench in a corner, with his knees and
chin huddled together, and rocked himself to and fro like a person
in severe pain.
The mother and son remained on one side of the court, and these two
men upon the other. Hugh strode up and down, glancing fiercely
every now and then at the bright summer sky, and looking round,
when he had done so, at the walls.
'No reprieve, no reprieve! Nobody comes near us. There's only the
night left now!' moaned Dennis faintly, as he wrung his hands. 'Do
you think they'll reprieve me in the night, brother? I've known
Barnaby Rudge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: legally contracted between negroes and whites; but public opinion
would stigmatize a man who should connect himself with a negress
as infamous, and it would be difficult to meet with a single
instance of such a union. The electoral franchise has been
conferred upon the negroes in almost all the States in which
slavery has been abolished; but if they come forward to vote,
their lives are in danger. If oppressed, they may bring an
action at law, but they will find none but whites amongst their
judges; and although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice
repulses them from that office. The same schools do not receive
the child of the black and of the European. In the theatres,
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