| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension
shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession.
The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals
broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench
off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space;
the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging,
and I went down in the hold to see what time it was.
People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms;
but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not
the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley.
I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Swifter than smoke on the starlit wind.
In the clear darkness, while the moon hides,
They come like dreams, like something remembered . .
Let us hurry! beloved; take my hand,
Forget these things that trouble your eyes,
Forget, forget! Our flesh is changed,
Lighter than smoke we wreathe and rise . . .
The cold air hisses between us . . . Beloved, beloved,
What was the word you said?
Something about clear music that sang through water . . .
I cannot remember. The storm-drops break on the leaves.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: have it there, to know my way back to it, but there was the school
tugging at me. I expect I was a good deal distraught and
inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful
strange people I should presently see again. Oddly enough I had no
doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me . . . Yes, I
must have thought of the garden that morning just as a jolly sort
of place to which one might resort in the interludes of a strenuous
scholastic career.
"I didn't go that day at all. The next day was a half
holiday, and that may have weighed with me. Perhaps, too, my state
of inattention brought down impositions upon me and docked the
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