| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Ev'ry one runs to see the flames destroying a dwelling,
Or a poor criminal led in terror and shame to the scaffold.
All the town has been out to gaze at the sorrowing exiles,
None of them bearing in mind that a like misfortune hereafter,
Possibly almost directly, may happen to be their own portion.
I can't pardon such levity; yet 'tis the nature of all men."
Thereupon rejoin'd the noble and excellent pastor,
He, the charm of the town, in age scarce more than a stripling:--
(He was acquainted with life, and knew the wants of his hearers,
Fully convinced of the worth of the Holy Scriptures, whose mission
Is to reveal man's fate, his inclinations to fathom;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: friendly chat with him. He told me this story of
his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and
lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anx-
ious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language,
with great fluency, but always with that singing,
soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that
instilled a strangely penetrating power into the
sound of the most familiar English words, as if
they had been the words of an unearthly language.
And he always would come to an end, with many
emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sen-
Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: with the family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on
the round, good- humored face of Anna Pavlovna at their meetings;
she remembered their secret confabulations about the invalid,
their plots to draw him away from the work which was forbidden
him, and to get him outof-doors; the devotion of the youngest
boy, who used to call her "my Kitty," and would not go to bed
without her. How nice it all wasl Then she recalled the thin,
terribly thin figure of Petrov, with his long neck, in his brown
coat, his scant, curly hair, his questioning blue eyes that were
so terrible to Kitty at first, and his painful attempts to seem
hearty and lively in her presence. She recalled the efforts she
Anna Karenina |
