| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: My sister loved me best of all;
She laid her kerchief over me,
And took my bones that they might lie
Underneath the juniper-tree
Kywitt, Kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!'
And when he had finished his song, he spread his wings, and with the
chain in his right claw, the shoes in his left, and the millstone
round his neck, he flew right away to his father's house.
The father, the mother, and little Marleen were having their dinner.
'How lighthearted I feel,' said the father, 'so pleased and cheerful.'
'And I,' said the mother, 'I feel so uneasy, as if a heavy
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: of the family were low, this representative of hereditary qualities
had made his appearance, and caused the traditionary gossips of
the town to whisper among themselves, "Here is the old Pyncheon
come again! Now the Seven Gables will be new-shingled!" From father
to son, they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of
home attachment. For various reasons, however, and from impressions
often too vaguely founded to be put on paper, the writer cherishes
the belief that many, if not most, of the successive proprietors of
this estate were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to
hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no question; but old
Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward from his own age
House of Seven Gables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: the forest beyond.
"They will not do that again," he thought; "the next time
they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon
the gun; the smoke will apprise me -- the report arrives too
late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun."
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round -- spinning
like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now
distant bridge, fort and men, all were commingled and
blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only;
circular horizontal streaks of color -- that was all he saw.
He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
