| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: indecision still fleeted across his face; he seemed as if
weighing his thoughts in the balance, and the considerations he
was resolving left him still silent. Austin tried to shake off
the remembrance of tragedies as hopeless and perplexed as the
labyrinth of Daedalus, and began to talk in an indifferent voice
of the more pleasant incidents and adventures of the season.
"That Mrs. Beaumont," he said, "of whom we were
speaking, is a great success; she has taken London almost by
storm. I met her the other night at Fulham's; she is really a
remarkable woman."
"You have met Mrs. Beaumont?"
The Great God Pan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: you were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in
that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your well-
being, in your pleasant room - and Damien, crowned with glories and
horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs
of Kalawao - you, the elect who would not, were the last man on
earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would
and did.
I think I see you - for I try to see you in the flesh as I write
these sentences - I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a
hyperbolical expression at the best. "He had no hand in the
reforms," he was "a coarse, dirty man"; these were your own words;
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shin-
ing far away. He turned painfully in his bed
and looked at his white hands, with all the
work gone out of them. He was ready to give
up, he felt. He did not know how it had come
about, but he was quite willing to go deep un-
der his fields and rest, where the plow could not
find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He
was content to leave the tangle to other hands;
he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.
O Pioneers! |
