| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars, the
willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.
He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that
it should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue;
he threw himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of
where to alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could
alight anywhere--not nearer Paris than an hour's run--on catching a
suggestion of the particular note required. It made its sign, the
suggestion--weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring--
at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly
the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of
being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung
together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an
equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had
accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown
faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was
failure. It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt,
dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its
unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: in short, which we enjoy ourselves, my companions and I."
It was evident that we did not understand one another.
"Pardon me, sir," I resumed, "but this liberty is only what every
prisoner has of pacing his prison. It cannot suffice us."
"It must suffice you, however."
"What! we must renounce for ever seeing our country, our friends,
our relations again?"
"Yes, sir. But to renounce that unendurable worldly yoke which men
believe to be liberty is not perhaps so painful as you think."
"Well," exclaimed Ned Land, "never will I give my word of honour
not to try to escape."
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
