| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: of soul and body; the other sat on the divan close by the chimney,
and attracted notice by a trenchant dissimilarity from all the
rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but he looked fully ten
years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen a man more
naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and ruinous
excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, was partly
paralysed, and wore spectacles of such unusual power, that his eyes
appeared through the glasses greatly magnified and distorted in
shape. Except the Prince and the President, he was the only person
in the room who preserved the composure of ordinary life.
There was little decency among the members of the club. Some
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: the weight of his leisure. For the first time communal dawdling
had lost its charm for him; not because his fellow dawdlers were
less congenial than of old, but because in the interval he had
known something so immeasurably better. He had always felt
himself to be the superior of his habitual associates, but now
the advantage was too great: really, in a sense, it was hardly
fair to them.
He had flattered himself that Susy would share this feeling; but
he perceived with annoyance that the arrival of their friends
heightened her animation. It was as if the inward glow which
had given her a new beauty were now refracted upon her by the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: difference in quality. How can I express it? The shapes of our
thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different. It was
as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in
transparent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly from my
point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their
ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but
visible always through mine.
I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth,
order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead
straight to beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got
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