| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: after long years, especially if they have lived as much and
as hard as this woman had. We stood looking at each other.
The eyes that peered anxiously at me were--simply Antonia's eyes.
I had seen no others like them since I looked into them last,
though I had looked at so many thousands of human faces.
As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me,
her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour
of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me,
speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.
`My husband's not at home, sir. Can I do anything?'
`Don't you remember me, Antonia? Have I changed so much?'
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: in Holland; so that the time-honored domestic customs might be
perpetuated around their hearthstones. This social group became more
and more restricted, until, at the close of the last century, it
mustered only some seven or eight families of the parliamentary
nobility, whose manners and flowing robes of office and magisterial
gravity (partly Spanish) harmonized well with the habits of their
life.
The inhabitants of Douai held the family in a religious esteem that
was well-nigh superstition. The sturdy honesty, the untainted loyalty
of the Claes, their unfailing decorum of manners and conduct, made
them the objects of a reverence which found expression in the name,--
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: bright sea, and saw the fair Attic shore, from Sunium to
Hymettus and Pentelicus, and all the mountain peaks which
girdle Athens round. But Athens itself he could not see, for
purple AEgina stood before it, midway across the sea.
Then his heart grew great within him, and he said, 'If I were
king of such a land I would rule it wisely and well in wisdom
and in might, that when I died all men might weep over my
tomb, and cry, "Alas for the shepherd of his people!"'
And Aithra smiled, and said, 'Take, then, the sword and the
sandals, and go to AEgeus, king of Athens, who lives on
Pallas' hill; and say to him, "The stone is lifted, but whose
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