| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: deathless god who came thither might wonder at the sight
and be glad at heart. There the messenger, the slayer of
Argos, stood and wondered. Now when he had gazed at all
with wonder, anon he went into the wide cave; nor did
Calypso, that fair goddess, fail to know him, when she saw
him face to face; for the gods use not to be strange one to
another, the immortals, not though one have his habitation
far away. But he found not Odysseus, the greathearted,
within the cave, who sat weeping on the shore even as
aforetime, straining his soul with tears and groans and
griefs, and as he wept he looked wistfully over the
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering
margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking
the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his
curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it
was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance
and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to
dismay. This only could it be - this only till he recognised, with
his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised
hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in
defiance, it was buried, as for dark deprecation. So Brydon,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: indeed had come over the hill and entered the cloisters.
III
Day showed the ocean's surface no longer glassy, but lying like a mirror
breathed upon; and there between the short headlands came a sail, gray
and plain against the flat water. The priest watched through his glasses,
and saw the gradual sun grow strong upon the canvas of the barkentine.
The message from his world was at hand, yet to-day he scarcely cared so
much. Sitting in his garden yesterday, he could never have imagined such
a change. But his heart did not hail the barkentine as usual. Books,
music, pale paper, and print--this was all that was coming to him,
some of its savor had gone; for the siren voice of Life had been speaking
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