| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: I; she gave me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a
flash of two bronze-colored braids, into the next car.
Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the
uncertain frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure.
The mountain air flapped my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one
match burned to the end and went out, and still I stared. For I
had seen on her expressive face a haunting look that was horror,
nothing less. Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have
to be written large before I can read them. But a woman in trouble
always appeals to me, and this woman was more than that. She was
in deadly fear.
The Man in Lower Ten |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: burden and shared it with none.
Just as thirty years before he had been haunted by the
temptation to suicide, so now he struggled with a new and more
powerful temptation, that of flight.
A few days before he left Yásnaya he called on
Márya Alexandróvna Schmidt at Ovsyanniki and
confessed to her that he wanted to go away.
The old lady held up her hands in horror and said:
"Gracious Heavens, Lyoff Nikolaievich, have you come to such
a pitch of weakness?"
When I learned, on October 28, 1910, that my father had left
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: self angrily why the deuce did I want to say that?
Mr. Burns in answer had only blinked at me. What
on earth did he mean?
I fell back on a question which had been in my
thoughts for a long time--the most natural ques-
tion on the lips of any seaman whatever joining a
ship. I voiced it (confound this self-consciousness)
in a degage cheerful tone: "I suppose she can travel
--what?"
Now a question like this might have been an-
swered normally, either in accents of apologetic
The Shadow Line |
