| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: the palms upon the islet, already trembled in the heat. A French
man-of-war was going out, homeward bound; she lay in the
middle distance of the port, an ant heap for activity. In the
night a schooner had come in, and now lay far out, hard by the
passage; and the yellow flag, the emblem of pestilence, flew on
her. From up the coast, a long procession of canoes headed
round the point and towards the market, bright as a scarf with
the many-coloured clothing of the natives and the piles of fruit.
But not even the beauty and the welcome warmth of the
morning, not even these naval movements, so interesting to
sailors and to idlers, could engage the attention of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: Bordereau formed altogether a new type of the American absentee.
Indeed it was plain that the American name had ceased to have
any application to them--I had seen this in the ten minutes I
spent in the old woman's room. You could never have said whence
they came, from the appearance of either of them; wherever it
was they had long ago dropped the local accent and fashion.
There was nothing in them that one recognized, and putting the question
of speech aside they might have been Norwegians or Spaniards.
Miss Bordereau, after all, had been in Europe nearly three-quarters
of a century; it appeared by some verses addressed to her by
Aspern on the occasion of his own second absence from America--
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "I was with him just three hours. All in the daytime and
in public places--railroad stations and upon a train.
When we reached our destination where we were to have been
married, two officers stepped up to my escort as we descended
from the train, and placed him under arrest. They took me
also, but when I had told my story they did not detain me,
other than to send me back to the convent under the care of
a matron. It seemed that the man who had wooed me was no
gentleman at all, but a deserter from the army as well as
a fugitive from civil justice. He had a police record in
nearly every country in Europe.
The Return of Tarzan |
