| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: told her I was so affected with the melancholy story she had
told, and the terrible things she had gone through, that it had
overcome me, and I begged of her to talk no more of it. 'Why,
my dear,' says she very kindly, 'what need these things trouble
you? These passages were long before your time, and they
give me no trouble at all now; nay, I look back on them with
a particular satisfaction, as they have been a means to bring
me to this place.' Then she went on to tell me how she very
luckily fell into a good family, where, behaving herself well,
and her mistress dying, her master married her, by whom she
had my husband and his sister, and that by her diligence and
Moll Flanders |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: Spins ever on its axle night and day,
With the bright summit of that horn which swells
Due from the pole, round which the first wheel rolls,
T' have rang'd themselves in fashion of two signs
In heav'n, such as Ariadne made,
When death's chill seized her; and that one of them
Did compass in the other's beam; and both
In such sort whirl around, that each should tend
With opposite motion and, conceiving thus,
Of that true constellation, and the dance
Twofold, that circled me, he shall attain
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: royal edict, he would never suffer his ministers to speak about any
new alliance, and when the Emperor himself sent to him, and offered
him the hand of the lovely Archduchess of Bohemia, his niece, in
marriage, he bade the ambassadors tell their master that the King
of Spain was already wedded to Sorrow, and that though she was but
a barren bride he loved her better than Beauty; an answer that cost
his crown the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which soon after,
at the Emperor's instigation, revolted against him under the
leadership of some fanatics of the Reformed Church.
His whole married life, with its fierce, fiery-coloured joys and
the terrible agony of its sudden ending, seemed to come back to him
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