| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Made easy for the comfort and attention
Of those who preach, fearing they preach in vain.
You are to plant, and then to plant again
Where you have gathered, gathering as you go;
For you are in the fields that are eternal,
And you have not the burden of the Lord
Upon your mortal shoulders. What you have
Is a light yoke, made lighter by the wearing,
Till it shall have the wonder and the weight
Of a clear jewel, shining with a light
Wherein the sun and all the fiery stars
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you,
even though they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that a man
who had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it,
knelt down and prayed, and the money came in by the next post.
Another man tried the same experiment, and the money did not come;
but he found afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made
by a wicked Jew. This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder
Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it,
he prayed that the mist might rise.
He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or fifteen
minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon,
Jude the Obscure |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: to me about the man! He never set foot in church excepting to see you
and to be married. People without religion are capable of anything.
Did Guillaume ever dream of hiding anything from me, of spending three
days without saying a word to me, and of chattering afterwards like a
blind magpie?"
"My dear mother, you judge superior people too severely. If their
ideas were the same as other folks', they would not be men of genius."
"Very well, then let men of genius stop at home and not get married.
What! A man of genius is to make his wife miserable? And because he is
a genius it is all right! Genius, genius! It is not so very clever to
say black one minute and white the next, as he does, to interrupt
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