| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: of idealistic perceptions. Can you imagine my John thrown away on
some enamoured white goose out of a stuffy old salon? Why, she
couldn't even begin to understand what he feels or what he needs."
"Yes," I said impenetrably, "he is not easy to understand."
"I have reason to think," she said with a suppressed smile, "that
he has a certain power over women. Of course I don't know anything
about his intimate life but a whisper or two have reached me, like
that, floating in the air, and I could hardly suppose that he would
find an exceptional resistance in that quarter of all others. But
I should like to know the exact degree."
I disregarded an annoying tendency to feel dizzy that came over me
The Arrow of Gold |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: exchanged looks of intelligence, which alarmed Hippolyte all the
more because he was winning; but at last a final hand left the
lovers in the old lady's debt.
To feel for some money in his pocket the painter took his hands
off the table, and he then saw before him a purse which Adelaide
had slipped in front of him without his noticing it; the poor
child had the old one in her hand, and, to keep her countenance,
was looking into it for the money to pay her mother. The blood
rushed to Hippolyte's heart with such force that he was near
fainting.
The new purse, substituted for his own, and which contained his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a
thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the
water flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and
warmest in winter. When the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the
cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were
stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side
with the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a
small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which
made them think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me
in another place what they thought was a "leach-hole," through which
the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing
Walden |
