| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: see nothing beyond credibility in the remarkable incidents of our
story. Indeed, the great difficulty will be at once got over, if
we can only bring ourselves to believe that, as soon as the old
dame bade him puff, there came a whiff of smoke from the
scarecrow's mouth. It was the very feeblest of whiffs, to be
sure; but it was followed by another and another, each more
decided than the preceding one.
"Puff away, my pet! puff away, my pretty one!" Mother Rigby kept
repeating, with her pleasantest smile. "It is the breath of life
to ye; and that you may take my word for."
Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched. There must have been
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: hair out over me. I slept, and all the while in my sleep I thought I heard
the birds calling across me. And when I woke it was like early morning,
with the dew on everything.
And the man took my hand and led me to a hidden spot among the rocks. The
ground was very hard, but out of it were sprouting tiny plants, and there
was a little stream running. He said, "This is a garden we are making, no
one else knows of it. We shine here every day; see, the ground has cracked
with our shining, and this little stream is bursting out. See, the flowers
are growing."
And he climbed on the rocks and picked from above two little flowers with
dew on them, and gave them to me. And I took one in each hand; my hands
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: of my wood-cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him his heavy and
glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure
you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle,
the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark,
so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.
`And, ever since, you have been with him, of course?' I said.
"On the contrary. It appears their intercourse had been very much
broken by various causes. He had, as he informed me proudly,
managed to nurse Kurtz through two illnesses (he alluded to it as you
would to some risky feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone,
far in the depths of the forest. `Very often coming to this station,
Heart of Darkness |
