| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat
upstairs in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced,
wrapped up in rugs to the waist. The house was still,
and the grayness of a cloudy day lay against the panes
of three lofty windows.
In a shabby dining-room, where a faint cold smell of
dishes lingered all the year round, sitting at the end of
a long table surrounded by many chairs pushed in with
their backs close against the edge of the perpetually laid
table-cloth, she read the opening sentence: "Most pro-
found regret--painful duty--your father is no more--
End of the Tether |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: For one of us, may still be for another
A coming gleam across the gulf of ages,
And a way home from shipwreck to the shore;
And so, through pangs and ills and desperations,
There may be light for all. There shall be light.
As much as that, you know. You cannot say
This woman or that man will be the next
On whom it falls; you are not here for that.
Your ministration is to be for others
The firing of a rush that may for them
Be soon the fire itself. The few at first
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: indulging, after the manner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the
delightful /far niente/ that tempts us at every age, he set out every
morning with part of a loaf and his books, and went to read and
meditate in the woods, to escape his mother's remonstrances, for she
believed such persistent study to be injurious. How admirable is a
mother's instinct! From that time reading was in Louis a sort of
appetite which nothing could satisfy; he devoured books of every kind,
feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history, philosophy, and
physics. He has told me that he found indescribable delight in reading
dictionaries for lack of other books, and I readily believed him. What
scholar has not many a time found pleasure in seeking the probable
Louis Lambert |
