| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: sad blow to both of us. When he heard I was leaving, and that
might be the last time we might meet - it almost was so - he was
terribly upset, and came round at once. We sat late, in Baxter's
empty house, where I was sleeping. My dear friend Walter Ferrier:
O if I had only written to him more! if only one of us in these
last days had been well! But I ever cherished the honour of his
friendship, and now when he is gone, I know what I have lost still
better. We live on, meaning to meet; but when the hope is gone,
the, pang comes.
R. L. S.
Letter: TO EDMUND GOSSE
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: gale, with black mountains of water hurling them-
selves on the Borgmester Dahl. Some of the men
never left their bunks; many became quarrelsome.
The chief engineer, an old man, refused to speak
at all to anybody. Others shut themselves up in
their berths to cry. On calm days the inert steamer
rolled on a leaden sea under a murky sky, or
showed, in sunshine, the squalor of sea waifs, the
dried white salt, the rust, the jagged broken
places. Then the gales came again. They kept
body and soul together on short rations. Once, an
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: accents of his wife, who after nineteen years of married life was not
yet fully known to him. "Constance, fear nothing! Here, read du
Tillet's letter to Monsieur de Nucingen; we are sure to obtain a
credit. Besides," he said, allowing himself a necessary lie, "there is
our uncle Pillerault; that is enough to give us courage."
"If that were all!" said Constance, smiling.
Birotteau, relieved of a heavy weight, walked away like a man suddenly
set at liberty, though he felt within him that indefinable sinking
which succeeds great moral struggles in which more of the nervous
fluid, more of the will is emitted than should be spent at one time,
and by which, if we may say so, the capital of the existence is drawn
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
