| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: won't hurt us to talk about it." She paused, and added,
lifting her head with one of her noble movements: "Or
even if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of it? You
might so easily have made a mistake."
He lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern
on the sunny path at their feet. "Mistakes are always
easy to make; but if I had made one of the kind you
suggest, is it likely that I should be imploring you to
hasten our marriage?"
She looked downward too, disturbing the pattern
with the point of her sunshade while she struggled for
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lesser Bourgeoisie by Honore de Balzac: noticing at first that the wine was drugged; but as he swallowed the
last drops he tasted the sickly and nauseating flavor, and flinging
the cup on the bed he cried out that some one was trying to poison
him.
"Poison! nonsense!" said the fishwife, pouring into her own mouth a
few drops of that which remained in the bottle, declaring to the old
man that if the wine did not seem to him the same as usual, it was
because his mouth had a "bad taste to it."
Before the end of the dispute, which lasted some time, the narcotic
began to take effect, and at the end of an hour the sick man was sound
asleep.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands;
you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted
all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you
thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you
had known once--somewhere--far away--in another existence perhaps.
There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it
will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream,
remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities
of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence.
Heart of Darkness |
