| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vailima Prayers & Sabbath Morn by Robert Louis Stevenson: this place of ease and hope, accept and inflame our gratitude; help
us to repay, in service one to another, the debt of thine unmerited
benefits and mercies, so that, when the period of our stewardship
draws to a conclusion, when the windows begin to be darkened, when
the bond of the family is to be loosed, there shall be no
bitterness of remorse in our farewells.
Help us to look back on the long way that Thou hast brought us, on
the long days in which we have been served, not according to our
deserts, but our desires; on the pit and the miry clay, the
blackness of despair, the horror of misconduct, from which our feet
have been plucked out. For our sins forgiven or prevented, for our
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: write and wrangle for a year on every page; one passage
particularly delighted me, the part about Ulysses - jolly. Then,
you know, that is just what I fear I have come to think landscape
ought to be in literature; so there we should be at odds. Or
perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne says it is a pot
with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the technical handle,
which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep for a
mistress. I should much like to talk with you about some other
points; it is only in talk that one gets to understand. Your
delightful Wordsworth trap I have tried on two hardened
Wordsworthians, not that I am not one myself. By covering up the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: up sending the children and coming to see us?"
Kitty answered that nothing had happened between them, and that
she could not tell why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her.
Kitty answered perfectly truly. She did not know the reason Anna
Pavlovna had changed to her, but she guessed it. She guessed at
something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not
put into words to herself. It was one of those things which one
knows but which one can never speak of even to oneself so
terrible and shameful would it be to be mistaken.
Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations
with the family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on
Anna Karenina |
