| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jewelled head.
And, where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some Old-World Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasaunce of the dead.
Ah! sweet indeed to rest within the womb
Of Earth, great mother of eternal sleep,
But sweeter far for thee a restless tomb
In the blue cavern of an echoing deep,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: least respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and how
cruelly certain it was that they could never stand six years of such
a life as they were living! They were lost, they were going down--
and there was no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it
gave them the vast city in which they lived might have been an ocean
waste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come
to Ona, in the nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie,
afraid of the beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes
of the old primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud, and woke
Jurgis, who was tired and cross. After that she learned to weep
silently--their moods so seldom came together now! It was as if
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: blinds fluttering, as if a gusty wind were blowing and people scudded
about trying in a hasty way to fasten hatches and make things ship-
shape. She had met Paul Rayley like that one day on the stairs. It had
been an earwig, apparently. Other people might find centipedes. They
had laughed and laughed.
But it tired Mrs Ramsay, it cowed her a little--the plates whizzing
and the doors slamming. And there would fall between them sometimes
long rigid Lily in her, half plaintive, half resentful, she seemed
unable to surmount the tempest calmly, or to laugh as they laughed, but
in her weariness perhaps concealed something. She brooded and sat
silent. After a time he would hang stealthily about the places where
To the Lighthouse |
