| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: awkward pause as though people were waiting to see something
happen. I looked round at the Boers who were muttering and
handling their rifles uneasily. Had they found a leader I really
think that some of the wilder spirits among them would have begun
to shoot, but none appeared and the crisis passed.
The crowd began to disperse, the English among them cheering and
throwing up their hats, the Dutch with very sullen faces. The
Commissioner's staff went away as it had come, back to the
building with blue gums in front of it, which afterwards became
Government House, that is all except you. You started across the
square alone with a bundle of printed proclamations in your hand
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: could to comfort me with the same arguments, and the same
moving eloquence that he did before, and left me not that
evening so long as the prisonkeepers would suffer him to stay
in the prison, unless he would be locked up with me all night,
which he was not willing to be.
I wondered much that I did not see him all the next day, it
being the day before the time appointed for execution; and I
was greatly discouraged, and dejected in my mind, and indeed
almost sank for want of the comfort which he had so often,
and with such success, yielded me on his former visits. I
waited with great impatience, and under the greatest oppressions
Moll Flanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since
my return from the eastern waters--some four years before the day
of which I speak.
It was in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a
Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a
vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real
intercourse. I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore,
and in the necessity of occupying my mornings Almayer (that old
acquaintance) came nobly to the rescue.
Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him
round my table, and then the rest of that Pantai band came full
A Personal Record |
