| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: the window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the
air in his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn't play. The young
man wondered if he should be able to teach him to play, though his
mother had said it would never do and that this was why school was
impossible. Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only
continued blandly: "Mr. Moreen will be delighted to meet your
wishes. As I told you, he has been called to London for a week.
As soon as he comes back you shall have it out with him."
This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply,
laughing as his hostess laughed: "Oh I don't imagine we shall have
much of a battle."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: conducted and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint.
You obtain none but dead substances, from which you have driven the
unknown force that holds in check the decomposition of all things here
below, and of which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are
but phenomena. Life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the
means of fixing life and holding it to its way. If bodies were beings
living of themselves they would be Cause itself, and could not die.
"When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is
shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you
proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in
explaining a thing that is! Genius ought to cast its eyes beyond
Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: Then turned, and so returned, and groaning laid
The naked sword athwart their naked throats,
There left it, and them sleeping; and she lay,
The circlet of her tourney round her brows,
And the sword of the tourney across her throat.
And forth he past, and mounting on his horse
Stared at her towers that, larger than themselves
In their own darkness, thronged into the moon.
Then crushed the saddle with his thighs, and clenched
His hands, and maddened with himself and moaned:
`Would they have risen against me in their blood
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