| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when
a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and
dark and dirty overhead, and found the thermometer had been
up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and
in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move
about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on
both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in;
beautifully green, for it was then that favoured moment in
the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity -- that
his tempered steel and elasticity are lost -- he for ever
afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external
to himself. His pervading and continual hope -- a hallucination,
which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like
the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief
space after death -- is, that finally, and in no long time, by
some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to
office. This faith, more than anything else, steals the pith and
availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of
The Scarlet Letter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: and politics with us both.
Mary Millward was another mute, - not so much tormented with cruel
kindness as Dick Wilson, because she had a certain short, decided
way of answering and refusing, and was supposed to be rather sullen
than diffident. However that might be, she certainly did not give
much pleasure to the company; - nor did she appear to derive much
from it. Eliza told me she had only come because her father
insisted upon it, having taken it into his head that she devoted
herself too exclusively to her household duties, to the neglect of
such relaxations and innocent enjoyments as were proper to her age
and sex. She seemed to me to be good-humoured enough on the whole.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
