| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: next movement. But the death that night of some conspicuous man that
had been predicted to him by Phanuel,--what if, by bringing it upon
another, he could avert it from himself, thought Antipas. If Iaokanann
was in very truth the Elias so much talked of, he would have power to
protect himself; and if he were only an ordinary man, his murder was
of no importance.
Mannaeus stood beside his chair, and read his master's thoughts.
Vitellius beckoned him to his side and gave him an order for the
execution, to be transmitted to the soldiers placed on guard over the
dungeon. This execution would be a relief, he thought. In a few
moments all would be over!
Herodias |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Holiday was sunk from sight as though he had never lived;
Monsignor was dead. Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a
thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to
know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had
once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely
repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from
mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best
mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The
pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession
of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans,
Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni
This Side of Paradise |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears.
The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this
vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause
in the centre of the obscured ceiling. I lifted up my head to look:
the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim; the gleam was such as the
moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I watched her come--
watched with the strangest anticipation; as though some word of doom
were to be written on her disk. She broke forth as never moon yet
burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved
them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the
azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on
Jane Eyre |
