| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: word now and then. They were no longer in his
own language. The fever had left him, taking
with it the heat of life. And with his panting
breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a
wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a
snare. She had left him. She had left him--sick
--helpless--thirsty. The spear of the hunter had
entered his very soul. 'Why?' he cried in the pen-
etrating and indignant voice of a man calling to a
responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a swish of
rain answered.
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: four.
But she had never perceived that any practical
advantage thereby accrued either to North Dormer or to
herself; and she had no scruple in decreeing, when it
suited her, that the library should close an hour
earlier. A few minutes after Mr. Harney's departure
she formed this decision, put away her lace, fastened
the shutters, and turned the key in the door of the
temple of knowledge.
The street upon which she emerged was still empty: and
after glancing up and down it she began to walk toward
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: It was as if some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer
into an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time maintaining
them to be an exact and veritable history. In the Middle Ages the legend
seems to have been half-forgotten until revived by the discovery of
America. It helped to form the Utopia of Sir Thomas More and the New
Atlantis of Bacon, although probably neither of those great men were at all
imposed upon by the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in
the early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind, seeking for
Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of the dulness of the
present into the romance of the past or some ideal of the future. The
later forms of such narratives contained features taken from the Edda, as
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