| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Lying there dead in the scattered sawdust,
Wet with a day's blown froth, I noted
That things were still; that the walnut tables,
Where men but a moment before were sitting,
Were gone; that a screen of something around me
Shut them out of my sight. But the gilded
Signs of a hundred beers and whiskeys
Flashed from the walls above, and the mirrors
And glasses behind the bar were lighted
In some strange way, and into my spirit
A thousand shafts of terrible fire
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early
with the scent of an old and melancholy house. Why, then, --while
so much of the soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest
leaves,--why should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had
already been accurst?
But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned
aside from his well-considered scheme, either by dread of the
wizard's ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however
specious. Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him
somewhat; but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own
ground. Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks
House of Seven Gables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: himself in time from so expressing his question, but she answered
as if she had heard the words.
"Don't you know--now?"
"'Now' -?" She had spoken as if some difference had been made
within the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was
already with them. "I know nothing." And he was afterwards to say
to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an
impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his
hands of the whole question.
"Oh!" said May Bartram.
"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.
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