| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: and grave. Not so the clarionet player; any artist or philosopher must
have come to a stop at the sight of him.
Picture to yourself a plaster mask of Dante in the red lamplight, with
a forest of silver-white hair above the brows. Blindness intensified
the expression of bitterness and sorrow in that grand face of his; the
dead eyes were lighted up, as it were, by a thought within that broke
forth like a burning flame, lit by one sole insatiable desire, written
large in vigorous characters upon an arching brow scored across with
as many lines as an old stone wall.
The old man was playing at random, without the slightest regard for
time or tune. His fingers traveled mechanically over the worn keys of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: for they have a nasty habit of keeping one treed for an hour or
more if balked in their designs; but at last we came in sight
of a line of cliffs running east and west across our path as
far as the eye could see in either direction, and I knew that
we reached the natural boundary which marks the line between
the Kro-lu and Galu countries. The southern face of these
cliffs loomed high and forbidding, rising to an altitude of
some two hundred feet, sheer and precipitous, without a break
that the eye could perceive. How I was to find a crossing I
could not guess. Whether to search to the east toward the
still loftier barrier-cliffs fronting upon the ocean, or
The People That Time Forgot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: fault of her own grand memory. Hadn't it been settled weeks
before?--for Miss Dolman it was always to be "Cooper's."
CHAPTER XIV
But the summer "holidays" brought a marked difference; they were
holidays for almost every one but the animals in the cage. The
August days were flat and dry, and, with so little to feed it, she
was conscious of the ebb of her interest in the secrets of the
refined. She was in a position to follow the refined to the extent
of knowing--they had made so many of their arrangements with her
aid--exactly where they were; yet she felt quite as if the panorama
had ceased unrolling and the band stopped playing. A stray member
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