| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to emigrate
to some unknown "warm rivers." Hundreds of peasants, among them the
Bogucharovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in
whole families toward the southeast. As birds migrate to somewhere
beyond the sea, so these men with their wives and children streamed to
the southeast, to parts where none of them had ever been. They set off
in caravans, bought their freedom one by one or ran away, and drove or
walked toward the "warm rivers." Many of them were punished, some sent
to Siberia, many died of cold and hunger on the road, many returned of
their own accord, and the movement died down of itself just as it
had sprung up, without apparent reason. But such undercurrents still
War and Peace |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: with a wound in the neck under the bronze rim of his helmet.
Glaucus, moreover, son of Hippolochus, captain of the Lycians, in
hard hand-to-hand fight smote Iphinous son of Dexius on the
shoulder, as he was springing on to his chariot behind his fleet
mares; so he fell to earth from the car, and there was no life
left in him.
When, therefore, Minerva saw these men making havoc of the
Argives, she darted down to Ilius from the summits of Olympus,
and Apollo, who was looking on from Pergamus, went out to meet
her; for he wanted the Trojans to be victorious. The pair met by
the oak tree, and King Apollo son of Jove was first to speak.
The Iliad |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: On board the Tremolino, wrapped up in a black CABAN, the
picturesque cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those massive
moustaches and his remorseless eyes set off by the shadow of the
deep hood, he looked piratical and monkish and darkly initiated
into the most awful mysteries of the sea.
XLIII.
Anyway, he was perfect, as Dona Rita had declared. The only thing
unsatisfactory (and even inexplicable) about our Dominic was his
nephew, Cesar. It was startling to see a desolate expression of
shame veil the remorseless audacity in the eyes of that man
superior to all scruples and terrors.
The Mirror of the Sea |
