| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: Venus rose out of the sea. Whether from an effect of contrast between
the darkness from which he issued and the light which bathed his soul,
whether from a comparison which he swiftly made between this scene and
that of their first interview, he experienced one of those delicate
sensations which true poetry gives. Perceiving in the midst of this
retreat, which had been opened to him as by a fairy's magic wand, the
masterpiece of creation, this girl, whose warmly colored tints, whose
soft skin--soft, but slightly gilded by the shadows, by I know not
what vaporous effusion of love--gleamed as though it reflected the
rays of color and light, his anger, his desire for vengeance, his
wounded vanity, all were lost.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: crying a great deal--simply, satisfyingly, refreshingly, with a
sort of primitive, retarded sense of loneliness and violence.
But she had none of the formalism or the self-consciousness
of grief, and I was almost surprised to see her standing
there in the first dusk with her hands full of flowers,
smiling at me with her reddened eyes. Her white face,
in the frame of her mantilla, looked longer, leaner than usual.
I had had an idea that she would be a good deal disgusted
with me--would consider that I ought to have been on the spot
to advise her, to help her; and, though I was sure there
was no rancor in her composition and no great conviction
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Frances Waldeaux by Rebecca Davis: house and, looking up, saw her.
He had stumbled into a world of peace and purity! A soft
splendor filled the sky and the bay and the green slopes,
with their clumps of mighty forest trees. The air was
full of the scents of flowers and the good-night song of
happy birds. And in the midst of it all, lady of the
great domain, under her climbing rose vines, sat the
young, fair woman, clad in some fleecy white garments,
her head bent, her blue eyes fixed on the
distance--waiting.
George stopped, sobered by a sudden wrench of his heart.
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