| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: from his unpublished autobiography:
1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.
Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me,
but it goes very well, and is going to save time and "language"--
the kind of language that soothes vexation.
I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography.
Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap--
more than thirty years! It is sort of lifetime. In that wide interval
much has happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us.
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity.
The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: I had half a mind to ask him point blank whether
he, at least, didn't know why Falk, a notoriously
unsociable man, had taken to visiting his ship with
such assiduity. After all, I reflected suddenly, it
was a most remarkable thing. I wonder now what
Hermann would have said. As it turned out he
didn't let me ask. Forgetting all about Falk ap-
parently, he started a monologue on his plans for
the future: the selling of the ship, the going home;
and falling into a reflective and calculating mood
he mumbled between regular jets of smoke about
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: CHAPTER IV
Before a week had elapsed he met Miss Fancourt in Bond Street, at a
private view of the works of a young artist in "black-and-white"
who had been so good as to invite him to the stuffy scene. The
drawings were admirable, but the crowd in the one little room was
so dense that he felt himself up to his neck in a sack of wool. A
fringe of people at the outer edge endeavoured by curving forward
their backs and presenting, below them, a still more convex surface
of resistance to the pressure of the mass, to preserve an interval
between their noses and the glazed mounts of the pictures; while
the central body, in the comparative gloom projected by a wide
|
