| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: though still with the utmost affability, 'but--except for your
admirable and lucid manner of telling it, which is perfect--not
very interesting to me.'
'When,' pursued the locksmith, quite unabashed and wholly
regardless of these interruptions, 'when he was taken to the jail,
he found that his fellow-prisoner, in the same room, was a young
man, Hugh by name, a leader in the riots, who had been betrayed and
given up by himself. From something which fell from this unhappy
creature in the course of the angry words they had at meeting, he
discovered that his mother had suffered the death to which they
both are now condemned.--The time is very short, Sir John.'
Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Four Arthurian Romances by Chretien DeTroyes: and took Gaudin of the Mountain; he captured knights and horses
alike: my lord Gawain did well. Girtlet the son of Do, and
Yvain, and Sagremor the Impetuous, so evilly entreated their
adversaries that they drove them back to the gates, capturing and
unhorsing many of them. In front of the gate of the town the
strife began again between those within and those without. There
Sagremor was thrown down, who was a very gallant knight. He was
on the point of being detained and captured, when Erec spurs to
rescue him, breaking his lance into splinters upon one of the
opponents. So hard he strikes him on the breast that he made him
quit the saddle. Then he made of his sword and advances upon
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: He tried as it were to keep his mind in blinkers, to see nothing
but the light of the candles on the altar-screen, the icons, and
those conducting the service. He tried to hear nothing but the
prayers that were being chanted or read, to feel nothing but
self-oblivion in consciousness of the fulfilment of duty--a
feeling he always experienced when hearing or reciting in advance
the prayers he had so often heard.
So he stood, crossing and prostrating himself when necessary, and
struggled with himself, now giving way to cold condemnation and
now to a consciously evoked obliteration of thought and feeling.
Then the sacristan, Father Nicodemus--also a great
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