| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: moonlight on the walls. And yet, it did seem to me," he added, "that far
away near the krantz by the river, I saw three figures moving. And
afterwards--it might have been fancy--I thought I heard the cry again; but
since that, all has been still there."
...
Next day a navvy had returned to the railway works.
"Where have you been so long?" his comrades asked.
"He keeps looking over his shoulder," said one, "as though he thought he
should see something there."
"When he drank his grog today," said another, "he let it fall, and looked
round."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has
closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open, and a
vision of her husband's face, through the aperture, smiling on
her, and gone in a moment. For the time, this little incident is
dismissed without a thought. But, long afterwards, when she has
been more years a widow than a wife, that smile recurs, and
flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield's visage. In
her many musings, she surrounds the original smile with a
multitude of fantasies, which make it strange and awful: as, for
instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look is
frozen on his pale features; or, if she dreams of him in heaven,
Twice Told Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: But in the case of women, supposing the wife to have received
instruction from her husband and yet she delights in wrong-doing,[12]
it may be that the wife is justly held to blame; but supposing he has
never tried to teach her the first principles of "fair and noble"
conduct,[13] and finds her quite an ignoramus[14] in these matters,
surely the husband will be justly held to blame. But come now (he
added), we are all friends here; make a clean breast of it, and tell
us, Critobulus, the plain unvarnished truth: Is there an one to whom
you are more in the habit of entrusting matters of importance than to
your wife?
[12] Cf. "Horsemanship," vi. 5, of a horse "to show vice."
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