| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: apartment was entered. The color of the panels, as ordered by his
wife, was too heavy, and the very dark green velvet used to cover the
benches added to the gloom of this entrance--not, to be sure, an
important room, but giving a first impression--just as we measure a
man's intelligence by his first address. An ante-room is a kind of
preface which announces what is to follow, but promises nothing.
The young husband wondered whether his wife could really have chosen
the lamp of an antique pattern, which hung in the centre of this bare
hall, the pavement of black and white marble, and the paper in
imitation of blocks of stone, with green moss on them in places. A
handsome, but not new, barometer hung on the middle of one of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: not writing at all--not a defense of what stood written already,
he said.
I admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve
as a good reason for not writing at all. But since I have
written them, all I want to say in their defense is that these
memories put down without any regard for established conventions
have not been thrown off without system and purpose. They have
their hope and their aim. The hope that from the reading of
these pages there may emerge at last the vision of a personality;
the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar as, for
instance, "Almayer's Folly" and "The Secret Agent," and yet a
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: "Is it indiscreet of me to ask what they were?"
She hung fire, but at last brought them out. "'Angel, write.'"
"Good!" I exclaimed. "I'll make it sure - I'll send him the same."
CHAPTER VII.
MY words however were not absolutely the same - I put something
instead of "angel"; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more
apt, for when eventually we heard from our traveller it was merely,
it was thoroughly to be tantalised. He was magnificent in his
triumph, he described his discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy
only obscured it - there were to be no particulars till he should
have submitted his conception to the supreme authority. He had
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