| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: sea disciples of the mythic Glaucus, the fisherman, who, enamoured
of the wonders of the sea, plunged into the blue abyss once and for
all, and became himself "the blue old man of the sea."
Next look at the corals, and Gorgonias, and all the sea-fern tribe
of branching polypidoms, and last, but not least, at the glass
sponges; first at the Euplectella, or Venus's flower-basket, which
lives embedded in the mud of the seas of the Philippines, supported
by a glass frill "standing up round it like an Elizabethan ruff."
Twenty years ago there was but one specimen in Europe: now you may
buy one for a pound in any curiosity shop. I advise you to do so,
and to keep - as I have seen done - under a glass case, as a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: a wife, and I've been a mother, and I never see such
unprincipled bread in Casterbridge as this before.--But you
must be a real stranger here not to know what's made all the
poor volks' insides plim like blowed bladders this week?"
"I am," said Elizabeth's mother shyly.
Not wishing to be observed further till she knew more of her
future in this place, she withdrew with her daughter from
the speaker's side. Getting a couple of biscuits at the
shop indicated as a temporary substitute for a meal, they
next bent their steps instinctively to where the music was
playing.
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: hospital where he was working as house-surgeon. I was then living
alone in our room, and I was the most attentive attendant; but care
and science alike were in vain. By the month of January, 1838, Marcas
himself felt that he had but a few days to live.
The man whose soul and brain he had been for six months never even
sent to inquire after him. Marcas expressed the greatest contempt for
the Government; he seemed to doubt what the fate of France might be,
and it was this doubt that had made him ill. He had, he thought,
detected treason in the heart of power, not tangible, seizable
treason, the result of facts, but the treason of a system, the
subordination of national interests to selfish ends. His belief in the
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