| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: nothing. We were resigned to our fate, and we remained
resigned until we aroused to the fact that we were
drifting along the north shore not a hundred feet away.
We began to paddle for it. Here the main force of the
current was flung back toward the south shore, and the
result of our paddling was that we crossed the current
where it was swiftest and narrowest. Before we were
aware, we were out of it and in a quiet eddy.
Our logs drifted slowly and at last grounded gently on
the bank. Lop-Ear and I crept ashore. The logs drifted
on out of the eddy and swept away down the stream. We
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: Madame de Mortsauf in a white dress standing at the edge of the
terrace. Instantly I rode towards her with the speed of lightning, in
a straight line and across country. She heard the stride of the
swallow of the desert and when I pulled him up suddenly at the
terrace, she said to me: "Oh, you here!"
Those three words blasted me. She knew my treachery. Who had told her?
her mother, whose hateful letter she afterwards showed me. The feeble,
indifferent voice, once so full of life, the dull pallor of its tones
revealed a settled grief, exhaling the breath of flowers cut and left
to wither. The tempest of infidelity, like those freshets of the Loire
which bury the meadows for all time in sand, had torn its way through
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: and all the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell
through his dithyrambs.
"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know
how to organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed.
"Your nineteenth century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores
the rich, it ignores the noble. In everything it is clean-shaven.
Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless.
The dreams of your bourgeois who set up, as they express it:
a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet, ebony and calico.
Make way! Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle
Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has been
Les Miserables |
