| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: it was possible for whole districts to be impassable, while civil
war raged between street and street, and for Alsatias to exist in
her midst in which the official police never set foot. She was
an ethnic whirlpool. The flags of all nations flew in her
harbour, and at the climax, the yearly coming and going overseas
numbered together upwards of two million human beings. To Europe
she was America, to America she was the gateway of the world.
But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social
history of the world; saints and martyrs, dreamers and
scoundrels, the traditions of a thousand races and a thousand
religions, went to her making and throbbed and jostled in her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: of adventurers. The idea, the word itself, wore a romantic horror
for him - he had always lived on such safe lines. Later it assumed
a more interesting, almost a soothing, sense: it pointed a moral,
and Pemberton could enjoy a moral. The Moreens were adventurers
not merely because they didn't pay their debts, because they lived
on society, but because their whole view of life, dim and confused
and instinctive, like that of clever colour-blind animals, was
speculative and rapacious and mean. Oh they were "respectable,"
and that only made them more immondes. The young man's analysis,
while he brooded, put it at last very simply - they were
adventurers because they were toadies and snobs. That was the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us
a checkmate physically there.'
Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She
did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she
loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an
excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of
intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the
human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point
of an excursion is that you come home again.
'And wouldn't you mind WHAT man's child I had?' she asked.
'Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
