| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: two girls. And here it was the good one that had come to grief!
I was poor comfort to her. I marvelled at her calm.
As we went back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes
to see if they was drying well, and seemed to take pride in
their whiteness--she said she'd been living in a brick block,
where she didn't have proper conveniences to wash them.
`The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it seemed
to be an understood thing. Ambrosch didn't get any other hand to help him.
Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution a good
while back. We never even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She didn't
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: collected and pondered all opinions and discussions for the purpose of
analyzing and controlling the various interests proclaimed and
supported by so many clever men. In fact, his misfortune was that of
most other ministers who have passed the prime of life; he trimmed and
shuffled under all his difficulties,--with journalism, which at this
period it was thought advisable to repress in an underhand way rather
than fight openly; with financial as well as labor questions; with the
clergy as well as with that other question of the public lands; with
liberalism as with the Chamber. After manoeuvering his way to power in
the course of seven years, the minister believed that he could manage
all questions of administration in the same way. It is so natural to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: were an experienced berthing-master in one of the London docks.
This old chap was doing his little share of the world's work with
proper efficiency. His little blue eyes had made out the danger
many hundred yards off. His rheumaticky feet, tired with balancing
that squat body for many years upon the decks of small coasters,
and made sore by miles of tramping upon the flagstones of the dock
side, had hurried up in time to avert a ridiculous catastrophe. I
answered him pettishly, I fear, and as if I had known all about it
before.
"All right, all right! can't do everything at once."
He remained near by, muttering to himself till the yards had been
The Mirror of the Sea |
