| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: No patrol boat lay ready with its familiar challenge.
Silent and empty lay the great city--empty and silent
the surrounding air.
What had happened?
Carthoris examined the dial of his compass. The pointer
was set upon Ptarth. Could the creature of his genius
have thus betrayed him? He would not believe it.
Quickly he unlocked the cover, turning it back upon
its hinge. A single glance showed him the truth, or at
least a part of it--the steel projection that communicated
the movement of the pointer upon the dial to the heart
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: near Chateau-Chinon, unknown to all, even to the woman he had loved!
Of this little yellow paper volume two hundred copies were printed;
one hundred and fifty were sold--about fifty in each department. This
average of tender and poetic souls in three departments of France is
enough to revive the enthusiasm of writers as to the /Furia Francese/,
which nowadays is more apt to expend itself in business than in books.
When Monsieur de Clagny had given away a certain number of copies,
Dinah still had seven or eight, wrapped up in the newspapers which had
published notices of the work. Twenty copies forwarded to the Paris
papers were swamped in the editors' offices. Nathan was taken in as
well as several of his fellow-countrymen of Le Berry, and wrote an
The Muse of the Department |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: Lambert's adventure; he was accustomed to spend the time allowed him
by his uncle for holidays at his father's house; but instead of
indulging, after the manner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the
delightful /far niente/ that tempts us at every age, he set out every
morning with part of a loaf and his books, and went to read and
meditate in the woods, to escape his mother's remonstrances, for she
believed such persistent study to be injurious. How admirable is a
mother's instinct! From that time reading was in Louis a sort of
appetite which nothing could satisfy; he devoured books of every kind,
feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history, philosophy, and
physics. He has told me that he found indescribable delight in reading
Louis Lambert |
