| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment
in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed--a
wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman
peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary
marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It
was a room with which she had never been able to establish any
closer relation than that between a traveller and a railway
station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left
that other room--she was startled by the same sense of
strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints, the flowers, the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: unthinking - infinitely receptive.
You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight
for a kingdom. Why should I? You don't want to think of things
which you meet every day in the newspapers and in conversation. I
had paid some calls since my return and most of my acquaintance
were legitimists and intensely interested in the events of the
frontier of Spain, for political, religious, or romantic reasons.
But I was not interested. Apparently I was not romantic enough.
Or was it that I was even more romantic than all those good people?
The affair seemed to me commonplace. That man was attending to his
business of a Pretender.
The Arrow of Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: of ship had left me marooned in a foreign ocean; the Pullman was
comfortably steaming home to port, while I--how was I to find
Judge Henry's ranch? Where in this unfeatured wilderness was Sunk
Creek? No creek or any water at all flowed here that I could
perceive. My host had written he should meet me at the station
and drive me to his ranch. This was all that I knew. He was not
here. The baggage-man had not seen him lately. The ranch was
almost certain to be too far to walk to, to-night. My trunk--I
discovered myself still staring dolefully after the vanished
East-bound; and at the same instant I became aware that the tall
man was looking gravely at me,--as gravely as he had looked at
The Virginian |
