| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand
each after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of
the contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they
averred, he would find something far better worth seeking than
the Unpardonable Sin. No mind, which has wrought itself by
intense and solitary meditation into a high state of enthusiasm,
can endure the kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of
thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now subjected. It
made him doubt--and, strange to say, it was a painful
doubt--whether he had indeed found the Unpardonable Sin, and
found it within himself. The whole question on which he had
The Snow Image |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: "And my father?"
"I carried him some; he said that he would come to thank the young
lord in person."
She took the bread and raised it to her mouth. With inexpressible
delight Andrii watched her break it with her shining fingers and eat
it; but all at once he recalled the man mad with hunger, who had
expired before his eyes on swallowing a morsel of bread. He turned
pale and, seizing her hand, cried, "Enough! eat no more! you have not
eaten for so long that too much bread will be poison to you now." And
she at once dropped her hand, laid her bread upon the plate, and gazed
into his eyes like a submissive child. And if any words could
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: My first impression on seeing him was neither surprise, nor distress,
nor interest, nor pity, but curiosity mingled with all these feelings.
He walked slowly, with a step that betrayed deep melancholy, his head
forward with a stoop, but not bent like that of a conscience-stricken
man. That head, large and powerful, which might contain the treasures
necessary for a man of the highest ambition, looked as if it were
loaded with thought; it was weighted with grief of mind, but there was
no touch of remorse in his expression. As to his face, it may be
summed up in a word. A common superstition has it that every human
countenance resembles some animal. The animal for Marcas was the lion.
His hair was like a mane, his nose was sort and flat; broad and dented
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