| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: The warmth was Clara's breathing heaving. He lifted his head,
and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange,
life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him,
yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid.
What was she? A strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his
in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than
themselves that he was hushed. They had met, and included in their
meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit,
the wheel of the stars.
When they stood up they saw other lovers stealing down the
opposite hedge. It seemed natural they were there; the night
Sons and Lovers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for
death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a
god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all
his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the
divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions,
silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
VII
A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her
glance in silence, and she faltered out, "Are you ill?"
The words restored his self-possession. "Ill? Of course not.
They told me you were out and I came upstairs."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: said to him; 'I could not get within hearing of them--there was such a
crowd.' 'You would have heard something worth hearing if you had.' 'What
was that?' I said. 'You would have heard the greatest masters of the art
of rhetoric discoursing.' 'And what did you think of them?' I said. 'What
did I think of them?' he said:--'theirs was the sort of discourse which
anybody might hear from men who were playing the fool, and making much ado
about nothing.' That was the expression which he used. 'Surely,' I said,
'philosophy is a charming thing.' 'Charming!' he said; 'what simplicity!
philosophy is nought; and I think that if you had been present you would
have been ashamed of your friend--his conduct was so very strange in
placing himself at the mercy of men who care not what they say, and fasten
|
