| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: He sees in the world a forest of sunlit jonquils:
A slow black poison huddles beneath that mirth.
Death, from street to alley, from door to window,
Cries out his news,--of unplumbed worlds approaching,
Of a cloud of darkness soon to destroy the tower.
But why comes death,--he asks,--in a world so perfect?
Or why the minute's grey in the golden hour?
Music, a sudden glissando, sinister, troubled,
A drift of wind-torn petals, before him passes
Down jangled streets, and dies.
The bodies of old and young, of maimed and lovely,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: absurd to renounce so easily and turn away helpless from the idea
that the only way to get hold of the papers was to unite myself
to her for life. I would not unite myself and yet I would have them.
I must add that by the time I sent down to ask if she would see me I
had invented no alternative, though to do so I had had all the time
that I was dressing. This failure was humiliating, yet what could
the alternative be? Miss Tita sent back word that I might come;
and as I descended the stairs and crossed the sala to her door--
this time she received me in her aunt's forlorn parlor--I hoped she
would not think my errand was to tell her I accepted her hand.
She certainly would have made the day before the reflection that
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.
But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime
would perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we
may suppose would pass away. But if Socialism were carried
out with any fulness, there would be more contraventions. We
see already new sins ringing up like mustard - School Board
sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act sins - none of
which I would be thought to except against in particular, but
all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a
hard master even in the beginning. If it go on to such
heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it come actually
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