| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master's hand.
Sometimes,--to-night, for instance,--the curtain is accidentally
drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in
the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan,
woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter
looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its
unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a
terrible question. "Is this the End?" they say,--"nothing
beyond? no more?" Why, you tell me you have seen that look in
the eyes of dumb brutes,--horses dying under the lash. I know.
The deep of the night is passing while I write. The gas-light
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: Handsome clerks of the Vimeux style have their salaries on which to
live, and their good looks by which to make their fortune. Devoted to
masked balls during the carnival, they seek their luck there, though
it often escapes them. Many end the weary round by marrying milliners,
or old women,--sometimes, however, young ones who are charmed with
their handsome persons, and with whom they set up a romance
illustrated with stupid love letters, which, nevertheless, seem to
answer their purpose.
Bixiou (pronounce it Bisiou) was a draughtsman, who ridiculed Dutocq
as readily as he did Rabourdin, whom he nicknamed "the virtuous
woman." Without doubt the cleverest man in the division or even in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: curving ice-enchanted river.
He loved his city with passionate wonder. He lost the accumulated weariness
of business--worry and expansive oratory; he felt young and potential. He was
ambitious. It was not enough to be a Vergil Gunch, an Orville Jones. No.
"They're bully fellows, simply lovely, but they haven't got any finesse." No.
He was going to be an Eathorne; delicately rigorous, coldly powerful.
"That's the stuff. The wallop in the velvet mitt. Not let anybody get fresh
with you. Been getting careless about my diction. Slang. Colloquial. Cut
it out. I was first-rate at rhetoric in college. Themes on--Anyway, not bad.
Had too much of this hooptedoodle and good-fellow stuff. I--Why couldn't I
organize a bank of my own some day? And Ted succeed me!"
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