| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: great world, and gamblers--on the most sensational side of Paris.
Every one who comes to us lets us into his neighbor's secrets.
Thwarted passion and mortified vanity are great babblers. Vice and
disappointment and vindictiveness are the best of all detectives. My
colleagues, like myself, have enjoyed all things, are sated with all
things, and have reached the point when power and money are loved for
their own sake.
" 'Here,' he said, indicating his bare, chilly room, 'here the most
high-mettled gallant, who chafes at a word and draws swords for a
syllable elsewhere will entreat with clasped hands. There is no city
merchant so proud, no woman so vain of her beauty, no soldier of so
Gobseck |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: her swiftly like a cloud of smoke with mastheads pro-
truding above. We went aloft to furl the sails. We
coughed on the yards, and were careful about the bunts.
Do you see the lot of us there, putting a neat furl on the
sails of that ship doomed to arrive nowhere? There
was not a man who didn't think that at any moment the
masts would topple over. From aloft we could not see
the ship for smoke, and they worked carefully, passing
the gaskets with even turns. 'Harbor furl--aloft
there!' cried Mahon from below.
"You understand this? I don't think one of those
Youth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: motionless and grave, he all excitement. With the tip of his leg,
he ventures to touch the plump wench. He has gone too far, daring
youth that he is! Panic-stricken, he takes a header, hanging by
his safety-line. It is only for a moment, however. Up he comes
again. He has learnt, from certain symptoms, that we are at last
yielding to his blandishments.
With his legs and especially with his palpi, or feelers, he teases
the buxom gossip, who answers with curious skips and bounds.
Gripping a thread with her front tarsi, or fingers, she turns, one
after the other, a number of back somersaults, like those of an
acrobat on the trapeze. Having done this, she presents the under-
The Life of the Spider |
