| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: presented to his astonished guest.
"What mummery is this, mine host?" said Tressilian. "Have you
supped as jollily as last night, and so mistaken your chamber?
or is midnight a time for masquerading it in your guest's
lodging?"
"Master Tressilian," replied mine host, "I know my place and my
time as well as e'er a merry landlord in England. But here has
been my hang-dog kinsman watching you as close as ever cat
watched a mouse; and here have you, on the other hand, quarrelled
and fought, either with him or with some other person, and I fear
that danger will come of it."
Kenilworth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap. It's stuck into
every volume as your foot is stuck into your shoe. It governs
every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every
comma."
I scratched my head. "Is it something in the style or something in
the thought? An element of form or an element of feeling?"
He indulgently shook my hand again, and I felt my questions to be
crude and my distinctions pitiful. "Good-night, my dear boy -
don't bother about it. After all, you do like a fellow."
"And a little intelligence might spoil it?" I still detained him.
He hesitated. "Well, you've got a heart in your body. Is that an
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its
general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things.
But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring
character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the
kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full
extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The
belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with
the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions
of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the
method of collocation of these stones--in the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which
The Fall of the House of Usher |
