| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: flesh of his fellow man and found it sweet. Yet even in those days it came
to pass that there was one whose head was higher than her fellows and her
thought keener, and, as she picked the flesh from a human skull, she
pondered. And so it came to pass the next night, when men were gathered
around the fire ready to eat, that she stole away, and when they went to
the tree where the victim was bound, they found him gone. And they cried
one to another, 'She, only she, has done this, who has always said, 'I like
not the taste of man-flesh; men are too like me; I cannot eat them.' 'She
is mad,' they cried; 'let us kill her!' So, in those dim, misty times that
men reck not of now, that they hardly believe in, that woman died. But in
the heads of certain men and women a new thought had taken root; they said,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: Although his blood so rose against this man, and his wrath so
stirred within him, that he could have struck him dead, he put such
fierce constraint upon himself that he passed him without a word or
look. Yes, and he would have gone on, and not turned, though to
resist the Devil who poured such hot temptation in his brain,
required an effort scarcely to be achieved, if this man had not
himself summoned him to stop: and that, with an assumed compassion
in his voice which drove him well-nigh mad, and in an instant
routed all the self-command it had been anguish--acute, poignant
anguish--to sustain.
All consideration, reflection, mercy, forbearance; everything by
Barnaby Rudge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: stories they told of their best friends who were absent, to note
the spiteful little digs they gave their best friends who were present,
to watch the utter incredulity with which they listened to the tale
of some other woman's conquests, the radiant good faith they displayed
in connection with their own, the instant collapse into boredom,
if some topic of so-called general interest, by some extraordinary chance,
were introduced." <172>
"You must have belonged to a particularly nice set," remarked Irais.
"And as for politics," he said, "I have never heard them
mentioned among women."
"Children and idiots are not interested in such things," I said.
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
