| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: SECRETA VITAE, comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie. Come
to think of it, Gosse, I believe the main distinction is that you
have a family growing up around you, and I am a childless, rather
bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted youth. I have, in fact, lost the
path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill. I
am going at it straight. And where I have to go down it is a
precipice.
I must not forget to give you a word of thanks for AN ENGLISH
VILLAGE. It reminds me strongly of Keats, which is enough to say;
and I was particularly pleased with the petulant sincerity of the
concluding sentiment.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: no trouble at all in entering the new-fashioned houses and leaving
toys for the children that lived in them.
And their deft services not only relieved Santa Claus of much labor,
but enabled him to complete his own work more quickly than usual, so
that the merry party found themselves at home with an empty sledge a
full hour before daybreak.
The only drawback to the journey was that the mischievous Wisk
persisted in tickling the reindeer with a long feather, to see them
jump; and Santa Claus found it necessary to watch him every minute and
to tweak his long ears once or twice to make him behave himself.
But, taken all together, the trip was a great success, and to this day
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: However, we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare's realism.
THE TEMPEST is the most perfect of palinodes. All that we desired
to point out was, that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own
dissolution, and that, if it drew some of its strength from using
life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as
an artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitution
of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an
imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. The
characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would
talk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are
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