| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story
about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell it. Generally
he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,
but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.
"Ah, you brute!" he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of a
lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of
guns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! you
have given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, I
suppose to my dying day."
"Tell us the yarn, Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised to
tell me, and you never have."
Long Odds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer,
who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the
first. Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the
under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it
was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of
the leading society.
If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon,
the doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have
here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry
(who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini
and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
* * * *
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
* * * *
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Prufrock/Other Observations |
