| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: that it would be taking a liberty to allude to his means of
subsistence, and felt ashamed of having watched him. His cupboard
stood open; in it there were two shirts, a white necktie and a razor.
The razor made me shudder. A looking-glass, worth five francs perhaps,
hung near the window.
The man's few and simple movements had a sort of savage grandeur. The
Doctor and I looked at each other, wondering what we could say in
reply. Juste, seeing that I was speechless, asked Marcas jestingly:
"You cultivate literature, monsieur?"
"Far from it!" replied Marcas. "I should not be so wealthy."
"I fancied," said I, "that poetry alone, in these days, was amply
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: Fluttered and hurried and throbbed. "Ah, woe that I hear you come,"
Rua cried in his grief, "a sorrowful sound to me,
Mounting far and faint from the resonant shore of the sea!
Woe in the song! for the grave breathes in the singers' breath,
And I hear in the tramp of the drums the beat of the heart of death.
Home of my youth! no more, through all the length of the years,
No more to the place of the echoes of early laughter and tears,
No more shall Rua return; no more as the evening ends,
To crowded eyes of welcome, to the reaching hands of friends."
All day long from the High-place the drums and the singing came,
And the even fell, and the sun went down, a wheel of flame;
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: here we are."
He was able to get through the other crises of dressing with comparative
resoluteness and calm.
His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity B.V.D. undershirt, in which he
resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard at a civic
pageant. He never put on B.V.D.'s without thanking the God of Progress that
he didn't wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments, like his
father-in-law and partner, Henry Thompson. His second embellishment was
combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead,
arching up two inches beyond the former hair-line. But most wonder-working of
all was the donning of his spectacles.
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