| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: lit by the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to
be distinctly unsatisfactory. It was not thin--on the contrary,
it seemed unhealthily obese; its skin showed bare patches of an
unpleasant character. However, they had not killed that dog for
the sake of the pelt. He was large. . . . He was eaten. . . .
The rest is silence. . . .
A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
"I could not have eaten that dog."
And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."
I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: to the station. Here in the middle of the first-class
waiting-room he sees the familiar figure of the guard standing
beside the station-master, a young man with a handsome beard and
in a magnificent rough woollen overcoat. The young man, probably
new to his position, stands in the same place, gracefully
shifting from one foot to the other like a good racehorse, looks
from side to side, salutes everyone that passes by, smiles and
screws up his eyes. . . . He is red-cheeked, sturdy, and
good-humored; his face is full of eagerness, and is as fresh as
though he had just fallen from the sky with the feathery snow.
Seeing Malahin, the guard sighs guiltily and throws up his
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like
microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who
answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered
abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could
agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at
the last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And
then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live
here." It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had
been thinking, at least in her sense of the words, "You mean I may
decide to stay on for the sake of it?"
"Well, WITH such a home - !" But, quite beautifully, she had too
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