| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 320
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The Waste Land |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: same stuff at the elbow, within which are others of Mechlin lace;
the black silk gloves, or mitts; the white hair combed back upon
a roll; and the cap of spotless cambric, which closes around the
venerable countenance--as they were not the costume of 1780, so
neither were they that of 1826; they are altogether a style
peculiar to the individual Aunt Margaret. There she still sits,
as she sat thirty years since, with her wheel or the stocking,
which she works by the fire in winter and by the window in
summer; or, perhaps, venturing as far as the porch in an
unusually fine summer evening. Her frame, like some well-
constructed piece of mechanics, still performs the operations for
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: this thing should be; but the thought is gone into your marrow, nor
is there any cure against the thought. Be it so, then, even as you
will; though power is less than weakness, power shall you have; and
though the thought is colder than winter, yet shall you think it to
an end."
So the King's daughter sat in her vaulted chamber in the masoned
house, and she thought upon the thought. Nine years she sat; and
the sea beat upon the terrace, and the gulls cried about the
turrets, and wind crooned in the chimneys of the house. Nine years
she came not abroad, nor tasted the clean air, neither saw God's
sky. Nine years she sat and looked neither to the right nor to the
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