| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Still farther to proceed behoveth me.
Thou fain wouldst know who is within this light
That here beside me thus is scintillating,
Even as a sunbeam in the limpid water.
Then know thou, that within there is at rest
Rahab, and being to our order joined,
With her in its supremest grade 'tis sealed.
Into this heaven, where ends the shadowy cone
Cast by your world, before all other souls
First of Christ's triumph was she taken up.
Full meet it was to leave her in some heaven,
 The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: wiggling down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let's pretend--'
And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to
say, beginning with her favourite phrase `Let's pretend.' She
had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before
--all because Alice had begun with `Let's pretend we're kings
and queens;' and her sister, who liked being very exact, had
argued that they couldn't, because there were only two of them,
and Alice had been reduced at last to say, `Well, YOU can be one
of them then, and I'LL be all the rest.' And once she had really
frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, `Nurse!
Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone.'
 Through the Looking-Glass |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: shoulders. It came into my head, as disconnected
ideas will come at all sorts of times into one's head,
that this, most likely, was the very room where, if
the tale were true, Falk had been lectured by Mr.
Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers' (the son's) over-
whelming voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had
been trying to articulate his words through a trom-
bone, was expressing his great regret at a conduct
characterised by a very marked want of discre-
tion. . . As I lived I was being lectured too! His
deafening gibberish was difficult to follow, but it
 Falk |