| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: She looked at me imploringly, panting with excitement.
While I reassured her and told her there would be plenty of time,
the barefooted boys from outside were slipping into the kitchen
and gathering about her.
`Now, tell me their names, and how old they are.'
As she told them off in turn, she made several mistakes about ages,
and they roared with laughter. When she came to my light-footed
friend of the windmill, she said, `This is Leo, and he's old enough
to be better than he is.'
He ran up to her and butted her playfully with his curly head,
like a little ram, but his voice was quite desperate.
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: these safeguards, portly clergymen, school-mistresses, gentlemen in
grey tweed suits, and all the ruck and rabble of British touristry
pour unhindered, MURRAY in hand, over the railways of the
Continent, and yet the slim person of the ARETHUSA is taken in the
meshes, while these great fish go on their way rejoicing. If he
travels without a passport, he is cast, without any figure about
the matter, into noisome dungeons: if his papers are in order, he
is suffered to go his way indeed, but not until he has been
humiliated by a general incredulity. He is a born British subject,
yet he has never succeeded in persuading a single official of his
nationality. He flatters himself he is indifferent honest; yet he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of how,
like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing
in both children--to let me alone without appearing to drop
me and to accompany me without appearing to surround.
They were never importunate and yet never listless.
My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse
themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer.
I walked in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever
to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being,
for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of
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