| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my
reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of
age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh
air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach
was lumbering along,--these things, together with an
indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of
those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with
the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very
nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.
We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women
and love. Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain
and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed
with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering.
Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showing
places of the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor
and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. The
theatre made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement
she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the
stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house
and worked in a shirt factory.
Chapter IX
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: but I did it without malice prepense. Women are so strange in their
influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness. However, I know
myself better now. A little judicious severity, perhaps...."
"Yes; but you must tighten the reins by degrees only.
Don't be too strenuous at first. She'll come to any terms
in time."
The caution was unnecessary, though Phillotson did not say so.
"I remember what my vicar at Shaston said, when I left after
the row that was made about my agreeing to her elopement.
'The only thing you can do to retrieve your position and hers is to
admit your error in not restraining her with a wise and strong hand,
Jude the Obscure |
