| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: their lives, and we were thankful enough when we got into open
water out of reach of the rocks they hurled at us. As for the
others there was not one of them left.
"Thence we sailed sadly on, glad to have escaped death, though
we had lost our comrades, and came to the Aeaean island, where
Circe lives--a great and cunning goddess who is own sister to
the magician Aeetes--for they are both children of the sun by
Perse, who is daughter to Oceanus. We brought our ship into a
safe harbour without a word, for some god guided us thither, and
having landed we lay there for two days and two nights, worn out
in body and mind. When the morning of the third day came I took
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: the calm look of eyes immortalized long since in the sublime works of
Raphael; here were the same grace, the same repose as in those
Virgins, and now proverbial. There was a delightful contrast between
the cheeks of that face on which sleep had, as it were, given high
relief to a superabundance of life, and the antiquity of the heavy
window with its clumsy shape and black sill. Like those day-blowing
flowers, which in the early morning have not yet unfurled their cups,
twisted by the chills of night, the girl, as yet hardly awake, let her
blue eyes wander beyond the neighboring roofs to look at the sky;
then, from habit, she cast them down on the gloomy depths of the
street, where they immediately met those of her adorer. Vanity, no
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: 'no, they live in me forever-- That is nothing,' she pointed without
emotion to the bodies they were bearing away. I then saw her for the
third time only since her birth. In church it is difficult to
distinguish her; she stands near a column which, seen from the pulpit,
is in shadow, so that I cannot observe her features.
"Of all the servants of the household there remained after the death
of the master and mistress only old David, who, in spite of his
eighty-two years, suffices to wait on his mistress. Some of our Jarvis
people tell wonderful tales about her. These have a certain weight in
a land so essentially conducive to mystery as ours; and I am now
studying the treatise on Incantations by Jean Wier and other works
Seraphita |
