| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: in the course of time we discovered he did not even
know that ships had names--'like Christian peo-
ple'; and when, one day, from the top of the Tal-
fourd Hill, he beheld the sea lying open to his view,
his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of wild surprise,
as though he had never seen such a sight before.
And probably he had not. As far as I could make
out, he had been hustled together with many others
on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of
the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his sur-
roundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: through Maitre Derville, from whose office I come, of the
existence of the famous archives architriclino-basochien, so
celebrated at the Palais, have implored our gracious master to
obtain them from his predecessor; for it has become of the highest
importance to recover a document bearing date of the year 1786,
which is connected with other documents deposited for safe-keeping
at the Palais, the existence of which has been certified to by
Messrs. Terrasse and Duclos, keepers of records, by the help of
which we may go back to the year 1525, and find historical
indications of the utmost value on the manners, customs, and
cookery of the clerical race.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: and they had most likely been in time. But I am not perfectly sure of
this; the current was strong, and a surprising distance seemed to
broaden between me and the Hermana before another boat came into sight
around her stern. By then, or just after that (for I cannot clearly
remember the details of these few anxious minutes), I had caught up with
John, whose face, and total silence, as he gripped the stern of the boat
with one hand and held Hortense with the other, plainly betrayed it was
high time somebody came. A man can swim (especially in salt water) with
his shoes on, and his clothes add nothing of embarrassment, if his arms
are free; but a woman's clothes do not help either his buoyancy or the
freedom of his movement. John now lifted Hortense's two hands, which took
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