| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Before from labour I make haste to live?
Some burn to gather wealth, lay hands on rule,
Or with white statues fill the atrium full.
The talking hearth, the rafters sweet with smoke,
Live fountains and rough grass, my line invoke:
A sturdy slave, not too learned wife,
Nights filled with slumber, and a quiet life.
DE HORTIS JULII MARTIALIS
MY Martial owns a garden, famed to please,
Beyond the glades of the Hesperides;
Along Janiculum lies the chosen block
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: still at school, and my elder brother a first-year student. I
had not yet known women but, like all the unfortunate children of
our society, I was already no longer innocent. I was tortured,
as you were, I am sure, and as are tortured ninety-nine
one-hundredths of our boys. I lived in a frightful dread, I
prayed to God, and I prostrated myself.
"I was already perverted in imagination, but the last steps
remained to be taken. I could still escape, when a friend of my
brother, a very gay student, one of those who are called good
fellows,--that is, the greatest of scamps,--and who had taught us
to drink and play cards, took advantage of a night of
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: Supreme Being, has his residence among these aerial heights. The
tribes on the eastern prairies call them the mountains of the
setting sun. Some of them place the "happy hunting-grounds,"
their ideal paradise, among the recesses of these mountains; but
say that they are invisible to living men. Here also is the "Land
of Souls," in which are the "towns of the free and generous
spirits," where those who have pleased the master of life while
living, enjoy after death all manner of delights.
Wonders are told of these mountains by the distant tribes, whose
warriors or hunters have ever wandered in their neighborhood. It
is thought by some that, after death, they will have to travel to
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