| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: she was so entirely absorbed in him that she lost all sense of
herself. Fascinated by this fellow's wit, magnetized by his airs, his
vices were but trivial defects in her eyes. She loved the puffs of
cigar smoke that the wind brought into her room from the garden; she
went to inhale them, and made no wry faces, hiding herself to enjoy
them. She hated the publisher or the newspaper editor who refused
Lousteau money on the ground of the enormous advances he had had
already. She deluded herself so far as to believe that her bohemian
was writing a novel, for which the payment was to come, instead of
working off a debt long since incurred.
This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced,
Call witness to their principles
And deprecate the lack of taste
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: "Yeh knows I'm stuck on yehs, don' yehs, Nell?"
"Sure," she repeated, carelessly.
Overwhelmed by a spasm of drunken adoration, he drew two or
three bills from his pocket, and, with the trembling fingers of an
offering priest, laid them on the table before the woman.
"Yehs knows, damn it, yehs kin have all got, 'cause I'm stuck on yehs,
Nell, damn't, I--I'm stuck on yehs, Nell--buy drinksh--damn't--we're havin'
heluva time--w'en anyone trea's me ri'--I--damn't, Nell--we're havin'
heluva--time."
Shortly he went to sleep with his swollen face fallen forward on his chest.
The women drank and laughed, not heeding the slumbering man in the corner.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
