| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: strange aspect indeed.
Sleep had hardly been thought of all night. The general alarm was
so apparent in the faces of the inhabitants, and its expression was
so aggravated by want of rest (few persons, with any property to
lose, having dared go to bed since Monday), that a stranger coming
into the streets would have supposed some mortal pest or plague to
have been raging. In place of the usual cheerfulness and animation
of morning, everything was dead and silent. The shops remained
closed, offices and warehouses were shut, the coach and chair
stands were deserted, no carts or waggons rumbled through the
slowly waking streets, the early cries were all hushed; a universal
Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: had the sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of
another self observing from without the stirring of subconscious
impulses that sent flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At
length he stood up, and with the gesture of a man who wishes to
give outward expression to his purpose--to establish, as it were,
a moral alibi--swept the letters into a heap and carried them
toward the grate. But it would have taken too long to burn all
the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one fitted
the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
put them back into the locked drawer.
III
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: had endowed them with little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately
fragrant skin, then came the admission--on his part that Madame
Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine that I
worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and
fast, when we found that we were in the same confraternity of
love. It was which of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for
an hour. The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had
prowled about her park to meet her one night. Out came all our
follies in fact. If it is pleasant to remember past dangers, is
|
