| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: me away," my companion dropped, "and I suppose they'd have done so
if I hadn't somehow got an idea that he's fascinating. In fact
Mrs. Saltram herself says he is."
"So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you've
seen!"
My young lady raised fine eyebrows. "Do you mean in his bad
faith?"
"In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of
some quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him
the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us."
"The humiliation?"
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: "My phantom-life was soon begun:
When I was barely six,
I went out with an older one -
And just at first I thought it fun,
And learned a lot of tricks.
"I've haunted dungeons, castles, towers -
Wherever I was sent:
I've often sat and howled for hours,
Drenched to the skin with driving showers,
Upon a battlement.
"It's quite old-fashioned now to groan
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: ensued a most lamentable scene--which, to many of those who had been
desirous of doing exactly the same thing, seemed a peculiarly horrible
instance of brazen-faced audacity.
So deeply did Chichikov become plunged in conversation with his fair
pursuers--or rather, so deeply did those fair pursuers enmesh him in
the toils of small talk (which they accomplished through the expedient
of asking him endless subtle riddles which brought the sweat to his
brow in his attempts to guess them)--that he forgot the claims of
courtesy which required him first of all to greet his hostess. In
fact, he remembered those claims only on hearing the Governor's wife
herself addressing him. She had been standing before him for several
Dead Souls |
