| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: savings. She occupied, in the rue du Bercail, one of those melancholy
ground-floor apartments which a traveller passing along the principal
street of a little provincial town can look through at a glance. The
street door opened at the top of three steep steps; a passage led to
an interior courtyard, at the end of which was the staircase covered
by a wooden gallery. On one side of the passage was the dining-room
and the kitchen; on the other side, a salon put to many uses, and the
widow's bedchamber.
Athanase Granson, a young man twenty-three years of age, who slept in
an attic room above the second floor of the house, added six hundred
francs to the income of his poor mother, by the salary of a little
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: full flood of light which smote my aching eyeballs painfully.
In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to
me. After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness
of a woman's existence may be called a thought, I had apparently
dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a
senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after
waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs. I lay still,
suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift
an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept,
how long Therese had been talking before her voice had reached me
in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable questions to
The Arrow of Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: how those things are."
For a while the vessel and its cargo and the landed men and various
business and conversations occupied them. But the freight for the mission
once seen to, there was not much else to detain them.
The barkentine was only a coaster like many others which had begun to
fill the sea a little more of late years, and presently host and guest
were riding homeward. Side by side they rode, companions to the eye, but
wide apart in mood; within the turbulent young figure of Gaston dwelt a
spirit that could not be more at ease, while revolt was steadily kindling
beneath the schooled and placid mask of the Padre.
Yet still the strangeness of his situation in such a remote, resourceless
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