| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: you; and do you know why? Because when you saw me spitting blood
you took my hand; because you wept; because you are the only
human being who has ever pitied me. I am going to say a mad thing
to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with a sad look
when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When he
died I cried more than when my mother died. It is true that for
twelve years of her life she used to beat me. Well, I loved you
all at once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have
for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less
ruinous to them.
"Your letter undeceived me; it showed me that you lacked the
Camille |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: it, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one
shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his manner of
leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but
in the ordinary course of progression--all these
peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes
of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the vil-
lage. They wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat
on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.
Neither did they go about the fields screaming dis-
mal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-
pitched voice from behind the ridge of some slop-
Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: reward. In process of time, they may perhaps be made the
Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or
Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but
a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air.
To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on
cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink
a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and
devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and
to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so
small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have
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