| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: little girls in the world,'' because sometimes when Bessie Bell would
get to thinking, and thinking about the strangeness of them, she
would almost wonder if she did not just remember them. When she
would give one just a little pinch to see if that one was a real
sure-enough little girl, why that little girl would say, ``Don't.''
She would say ``Don't!'' just the same as a little girl in the row of
little girls all with blue checked aprons would say ``Don't,'' if you
pinched one of them ever so little.
There were no Sisters on that high mountain. Sister Helen Vincula
was the only Sister there. That seemed very strange to Bessie Bell.
One day the strangest thing of all so far happened.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: really lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate;
there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed;
never was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness
and freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman.
I had perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my
initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged
sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of
what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty.
Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD
been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof
that it could ever have flowered into an act.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: gentleman did not go to confession for twenty years after. He
kept away from the church, to be sure, and died impenitent. He
burst. He was a very fat man, so he burst lengthways. Then
everything was taken from the young master, from Seryozha, to pay
the debts -- everything there was. Well, he had not gone very far
in his studies, he couldn't do anything, and the president
of the Rural Board, his uncle -- 'I'll take him' -- Seryozha, I
mean -- thinks he, 'for an agent; let him collect the insurance,
that's not a difficult job,' and the gentleman was young and
proud, he wanted to be living on a bigger scale and in better
style and with more freedom. To be sure it was a come-down for
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
