| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: to base her vision on. She looked down the railway carriage, the
omnibus; took a line from shoulder or cheek; looked at the windows
opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-strung in the evening. All had been part
of the fields of death. But always something--it might be a face, a
voice, a paper boy crying STANDARD, NEWS--thrust through, snubbed her,
waked her, required and got in the end an effort of attention, so that
the vision must be perpetually remade. Now again, moved as she was by
some instinctive need of distance and blue, she looked at the bay
beneath her, making hillocks of the blue spaces, again she was roused
as usual by something incongruous. There was a brown spot in the
middle of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a
To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: Scotchman with complicated spectacles, who would come every
morning as a sort of volunteer supplementary demonstrator, look
very closely at her work and her, tell her that her dissections
were "fairish," or "very fairish indeed," or "high above the
normal female standard," hover as if for some outbreak of
passionate gratitude and with admiring retrospects that made the
facetted spectacles gleam like diamonds, return to his own place.
The women, Ann Veronica thought, were not quite so interesting as
the men. There were two school-mistresses, one of whom--Miss
Klegg--might have been a first cousin to Miss Miniver, she had so
many Miniver traits; there was a preoccupied girl whose name Ann
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: had unconsciously governed his choice of a career, and if it ever
failed him in life it was perhaps in the one exceptional
circumstance of his marriage - which was also natural. It fed,
since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material which was
brought to it in its official seclusion. We can never cease to be
ourselves.
His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed, and nursing his cheek
in the palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner in
charge of the Special Crimes branch was getting hold of the case
with growing interest. His Chief Inspector, if not an absolutely
worthy foeman of his penetration, was at any rate the most worthy
The Secret Agent |
