| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere. The memory
of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it then,
when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me,
was delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs
and tables (arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves
and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass,
silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses.
The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing young men,
laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or less
after the period in which the play was written; the women were not.
I saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: angle, and summoning all his resolution, attacked the ground
with the pickaxe. At the fifth or sixth blow the pickaxe
struck against an iron substance. Never did funeral knell,
never did alarm-bell, produce a greater effect on the
hearer. Had Dantes found nothing he could not have become
more ghastly pale. He again struck his pickaxe into the
earth, and encountered the same resistance, but not the same
sound. "It is a casket of wood bound with iron," thought he.
At this moment a shadow passed rapidly before the opening;
Dantes seized his gun, sprang through the opening, and
mounted the stair. A wild goat had passed before the mouth
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: Siegfried. With the horror fresh upon him of the sort of
nightmare into which he has fallen after the departure of the
Wanderer, and which has taken the form, at once fanciful and
symbolic, of a delirious dread of light, he asks Siegfried
whether he has never, whilst wandering in the forest, had his
heart set hammering in frantic dread by the mysterious lights of
the gloaming. To this, Siegfried, greatly astonished, replies
that on such occasions his heart is altogether healthy and his
sensations perfectly normal Here Mimmy's question is accompanied
by the tremulous sounding of the fire theme with its harmonies
most oppressively disturbed and troubled; whereas with
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