| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: CHAPTER XVI
Into that same black night, almost, indeed, into the very same layer
of starlit air, Katharine Hilbery was now gazing, although not with a
view to the prospects of a fine day for duck shooting on the morrow.
She was walking up and down a gravel path in the garden of Stogdon
House, her sight of the heavens being partially intercepted by the
light leafless hoops of a pergola. Thus a spray of clematis would
completely obscure Cassiopeia, or blot out with its black pattern
myriads of miles of the Milky Way. At the end of the pergola, however,
there was a stone seat, from which the sky could be seen completely
swept clear of any earthly interruption, save to the right, indeed,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: she wrote the other day, "until the first frosts nip them off,
when they will disappear like belated dahlias--double ones of course,
for single dahlias are too charming to be compared to relations.
I have every sort of cousin and uncle and aunt here, and here they have
been ever since my husband's birthday--not the same ones exactly, but I
get so confused that I never know where one ends and the other begins.
My husband goes off after breakfast to look at his crops, he says,
and I am left at their mercy. I wish I had crops to <222> go and look at--
I should be grateful even for one, and would look at it from morning
till night, and quite stare it out of countenance, sooner than stay
at home and have the truth told me by enigmatic aunts. Do you know
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: about the play; then from one thing to another they would come to
their own affairs, and the mother would walk on and on, heedless of
complaints or question from the little one that dragged at her hand,
while she and her husband reckoned up the wages to be paid on the
morrow, and spent the money in a score of different ways. Then came
domestic details, lamentations over the excessive dearness of
potatoes, or the length of the winter and the high price of block
fuel, together with forcible representations of amounts owing to the
baker, ending in an acrimonious dispute, in the course of which such
couples reveal their characters in picturesque language. As I
listened, I could make their lives mine, I felt their rags on my back,
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