The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: jangled along a prominent side-street. A dozen cabs, with coat-enshrouded
drivers, clattered to and fro. Electric lights, whirring softly,
shed a blurred radiance. A flower dealer, his feet tapping
impatiently, his nose and his wares glistening with rain-drops,
stood behind an array of roses and chrysanthemums. Two or three
theatres emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements. Men
pulled their hats over their eyebrows and raised their collars to
their ears. Women shrugged impatient shoulders in their warm
cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk through the
storm. People having been comparatively silent for two hours burst
into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the
 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: "The next matter is, have you heard anything of
Fanny?"
"Nothing, ma'am.
"Have you done anything?"
"I met Farmer Boldwood." said Jacob Smallbury, 'and
I went with him and two of his men, and dragged New-
mill Pond, but we found nothing."
"And the new shepherd have been to Buck's Head,
by Yalbury, thinking she had gone there, but nobody
had seed her." said Laban Tall.
"Hasn't William Smallbury been to Casterbridge?"
 Far From the Madding Crowd |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: surroundings; but the soul which desires the body, and which, as I was
relating before, has long been fluttering about the lifeless frame and the
world of sight, is after many struggles and many sufferings hardly and with
violence carried away by her attendant genius, and when she arrives at the
place where the other souls are gathered, if she be impure and have done
impure deeds, whether foul murders or other crimes which are the brothers
of these, and the works of brothers in crime--from that soul every one
flees and turns away; no one will be her companion, no one her guide, but
alone she wanders in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled,
and when they are fulfilled, she is borne irresistibly to her own fitting
habitation; as every pure and just soul which has passed through life in
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