| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: heavy artillery.
When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in
the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she
welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who
means to be obeyed. She addressed the controller of excise as "M.
Chatelet," and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that
she knew about the illegal superfetation of the particle. Lucien was
forced upon her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which
every person in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.
Nais had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.
There was a rumor of insurrection. Amelie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: never entered that a fortune could be rejected.
"I refuse," said Ursula.
"But what grounds have you for offering Mademoiselle Ursula such a
fortune?" asked Bongrand, looking fixedly at Minoret. "You have an
idea--have you an idea?--"
"Well, yes, the idea of getting her out of Nemours, so that my son
will leave me in peace; he is in love with her and wants to marry
her."
"Well, we'll see about it," said Bongrand, settling his spectacles.
"Give us time to think it over."
He walked home with Minoret, applauding the solicitude shown by the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: with an urbane distaste for the concrete. "And I like large parties.
They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader
rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are
going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attracted
so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers,
you know there was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension,
and added: "Some sensation!" Whereupon everybody laughed.
"The piece is known," he concluded lustily, "as Vladimir Tostoff's
JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD."
The Great Gatsby |
