| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: `Why, sure, Jim.' A moment later she drew her face away and whispered
indignantly, `Why, Jim! You know you ain't right to kiss me like that.
I'll tell your grandmother on you!'
`Lena Lingard lets me kiss her,' I retorted, `and I'm not half as fond
of her as I am of you.'
`Lena does?' Tony gasped. `If she's up to any of her nonsense
with you, I'll scratch her eyes out!' She took my arm again
and we walked out of the gate and up and down the sidewalk.
`Now, don't you go and be a fool like some of these town boys.
You're not going to sit around here and whittle store-boxes
and tell stories all your life. You are going away to school
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: if she was draped as a pessimist he was sure she liked the taste of
life. He thanked her for her appreciation - aware at the same time
that he didn't appear to thank her enough and that she might think
him ungracious. He was afraid she would ask him to explain
something he had written, and he always winced at that - perhaps
too timidly - for to his own ear the explanation of a work of art
sounded fatuous. But he liked her so much as to feel a confidence
that in the long run he should be able to show her he wasn't rudely
evasive. Moreover she surely wasn't quick to take offence, wasn't
irritable; she could be trusted to wait. So when he said to her,
"Ah don't talk of anything I've done, don't talk of it HERE;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: himself known, as he hid his face in a handkerchief of fine
Frisian linen, with which he incessantly wiped his brow or
his burning lips.
With an eye keen as that of a bird of prey, -- with a long
aquiline nose, a finely cut mouth, which he generally kept
open, or rather which was gaping like the edges of a wound,
-- this man would have presented to Lavater, if Lavater had
lived at that time, a subject for physiognomical
observations which at the first blush would not have been
very favourable to the person in question.
"What difference is there between the figure of the
The Black Tulip |
