| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: in her fingers was crushed by her convulsive clutch.
"When are you to be Grand Duke?" asked the sixth. There was the
frenzy of a Bacchante in her eyes, and her teeth gleamed between
the lips parted with a smile of cruel glee.
"Yes, when is that father of yours going to die?" asked the
seventh, throwing her bouquet at Don Juan with bewitching
playfulness. It was a childish girl who spoke, and the speaker
was wont to make sport of sacred things.
"Oh! don't talk about it," cried Don Juan, the young and handsome
giver of the banquet. "There is but one eternal father, and, as
ill luck will have it, he is mine."
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: vodka, or whether the bottle was wet, but all I remember is that
when the cork flew up to the ceiling with a bang, my bottle
slipped out of my hands and fell on the floor. Not more than a
glass of the wine was spilt, as I managed to catch the bottle and
put my thumb over the foaming neck.
"Well, may the New Year bring you happiness!" I said, filling two
glasses. "Drink!"
My wife took her glass and fixed her frightened eyes on me. Her
face was pale and wore a look of horror.
"Did you drop the bottle?" she asked.
"Yes. But what of that?"
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us.
Much as I had made of the fact that this name had never once,
between us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with
which the child's face now received it fairly likened
my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass.
It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence--
the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn,
within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own.
I seized my colleague's arm. "She's there, she's there!"
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she
|
