| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: produce simpletons. How else can we account for a scheme devoid of
method or any notion of the future?
"The /Institut/ might be the central government of the moral and
intellectual world; but it has been ruined lately by its
subdivision into separate academies. So human science marches on,
without a guide, without a system, and floats haphazard with no
road traced out.
"This vagueness and uncertainty prevails in politics as well as in
science. In the order of nature means are simple, the end is grand
and marvelous; here in science as in government, the means are
stupendous, the end is mean. The force which in nature proceeds at
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: were old acquaintances. Even then I noticed the unusual colour of her eyes--
a shade of deep violet--and their soft, confiding expression.
Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large family.
Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters,
and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was
a good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been talked about.
She was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had--
and that at an age when she should still have been in pinafores.
Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement.
He was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit
with him. After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife,
My Antonia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: confidence, which was just as well perhaps. His business was
transacted in an apartment furnished like a drawing-room, the walls
hung with several brown, heavily-framed, oil paintings. I don't
know if they were good, but they were big, and with their elaborate,
tarnished gilt-frames had a melancholy dignity. The man himself sat
at a shining, inlaid writing table which looked like a rare piece
from a museum of art; his chair had a high, oval, carved back,
upholstered in faded tapestry; and these objects made of the costly
black Havana cigar, which he rolled incessantly from the middle to
the left corner of his mouth and back again, an inexpressibly cheap
and nasty object. I had to see him several times in the interest of
Chance |
