| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: first to carry out the order and then ask for payment."
"Oh, very well!" the customer assented.
A bright flame suddenly flared up in the mortar, a pink thick
smoke came puffing out, and there was a smell of burnt feathers
and sulphur. When the smoke had subsided, Fyodor rubbed his eyes
and saw that he was no longer Fyodor, no longer a shoemaker, but
quite a different man, wearing a waistcoat and a watch-chain, in
a new pair of trousers, and that he was sitting in an armchair at
a big table. Two foot men were handing him dishes, bowing low and
saying:
"Kindly eat, your honor, and may it do you good!"
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement;
and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious
tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of
narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues instead
an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all, it
imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but
the emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells
of them. The real art that dealt with life directly was that of
the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire.
Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in
making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: his tacit assent to her wish that since they couldn't attempt a
certain frankness they should attempt nothing at all. This was her
intense preference; she could be as still and cold as any one when
that was the sole solution.
Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants
struck her as marking a step: they were built so--just in the mere
flash--on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was
she would do for him. The "anything, anything" she had uttered in
the Park went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china
that interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their
not needing now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former
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