| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: I was far from convinced. Not one of the servants would go into
that wing at night unless driven by dire necessity. And a
billiard cue! As a weapon of either offense or defense it was an
absurdity, unless one accepted Liddy's hypothesis of a ghost, and
even then, as Halsey pointed out, a billiard-playing ghost would
be a very modern evolution of an ancient institution.
That afternoon we, Gertrude, Halsey and I, attended the coroner's
inquest in town. Doctor Stewart had been summoned also, it
transpiring that in that early Sunday morning, when Gertrude and
I had gone to our rooms, he had been called to view the body. We
went, the four of us, in the machine, preferring the execrable
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: way toward Malamocco. But presently I flung myself down again
on the warm sand, in the breeze, on the coarse dry grass.
It took it out of me to think I had been so much at fault,
that I had unwittingly but nonetheless deplorably trifled.
But I had not given her cause--distinctly I had not.
I had said to Mrs. Prest that I would make love to her;
but it had been a joke without consequences and I had never
said it to Tita Bordereau. I had been as kind as possible,
because I really liked her; but since when had that become a crime
where a woman of such an age and such an appearance was concerned?
I am far from remembering clearly the succession of events and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: she meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her
umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom,
why should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her
behavior in practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this
perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the
life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice
on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the
other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not
possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential
change? Was this not the chance he offered her--the rare and wonderful
chance of friendship? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in
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