| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: "I neither know nor care. What does it matter!"
They were at the entrance to the Grove. The wet, red track,
already sticky with fallen leaves, went up the steep bank between
the grass. On either side stood the elm-trees like pillars along
a great aisle, arching over and making high up a roof from which the
dead leaves fell. All was empty and silent and wet. She stood on
top of the stile, and he held both her hands. Laughing, she looked
down into his eyes. Then she leaped. Her breast came against his;
he held her, and covered her face with kisses.
They went on up the slippery, steep red path. Presently she
released his hand and put it round her waist.
Sons and Lovers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: little La Billardiere, a budding fashionable, Monsieur Desmarets, and
the official personages. But among all the faces, more or less
comical, from which the assemblage took its character, there was one
that was particularly washed-out, like a five-franc piece of the
Republic, and whose owner's apparel rendered him a curiosity. We guess
at once the little tyrant of the Cour Batave, arrayed with linen
yellowed by lying by in a cupboard, and exhibiting to the eye a shirt-
frill of lace that had been an heirloom, fastened with a bluish cameo
set as a pin; he wore short black-silk breeches which revealed the
skinny legs on which he boldly stood. Cesar showed him, triumphantly,
the four rooms constructed by the architect out of the first floors of
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said what the effect
resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive prohibition, of music
perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all adjusted and
all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at any
rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment
of the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to HER?)
so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle
cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as safe, would have
been not only to see them listen as to a goodwife's tale, but
really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came to in
truth was that poor Marcher waded through his beaten grass, where
|
