| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience 330
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
The Waste Land |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: bitterly, envies passionately. Poverty, he protests, drives
men to steal, as hunger makes the wolf sally from the forest.
The poor, he goes on, will always have a carping word to say,
or, if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious thoughts.
It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor. Thousands in
a small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through
life with tenfold as much honour and dignity and peace of
mind, as the rich gluttons whose dainties and state-beds
awakened Villon's covetous temper. And every morning's sun
sees thousands who pass whistling to their toil. But Villon
was the "mauvais pauvre" defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: the stranger's eyes produced a vivid and unpleasant impression, which
was only deepened by the rigid outlines of his features. The dried-up,
emaciated creature seemed to carry within him some gnawing thought
that consumed him and could not be appeased.
He must have digested his food so rapidly that he could doubtless eat
continually without bringing any trace of color into his face or
features. A tun of Tokay vin de succession would not have caused any
faltering in that piercing glance that read men's inmost thoughts, nor
dethroned the merciless reasoning faculty that always seemed to go to
the bottom of things. There was something of the fell and tranquil
majesty of a tiger about him.
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