| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: around him and then again at his feet. The former and the latter
were alike familiar and his own. The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran
merrily along the side of the road, sometimes in proof of its
agility and self-satisfaction lifting one hind leg and hopping along
on three, and then again going on all four and rushing to bark at
the crows that sat on the carrion. The dog was merrier and sleeker
than it had been in Moscow. All around lay the flesh of different
animals- from men to horses- in various stages of decomposition; and
as the wolves were kept off by the passing men the dog could eat all
it wanted.
It had been raining since morning and had seemed as if at any moment
War and Peace |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: has plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most
trivial detail had its significance, and the rapture of recovery
was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had
missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was
irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was
passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his
loss. It was as though she had bought him with her blood. . . .
That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed
her to the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding
her; he was hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words
they lapsed into silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: men and things seem to be set in flaming brilliants, ecstasy is the
prevailing spirit; but they are short-lived, they reach their climax
speedily, then society relapses into a long fit of nervous reaction
before it learns how to appropriate the fruits of its period of feverish
excitement. Proletarian revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of
the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly; constantly
interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to what seems to
have been accomplished, in order to start over anew; scorn with cruel
thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first
attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable him
to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise up against
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