| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: sympathetic eagerness, and that confuses the bizarre with the
beautiful, and vulgarity with truth, they are extremely
accomplished. They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of
epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as paradoxes, and as for
their portraits, whatever the commonplace may say against them, no
one can deny that they possess that unique and wonderful charm
which belongs to works of pure fiction. But even the
Impressionists, earnest and industrious as they are, will not do.
I like them. Their white keynote, with its variations in lilac,
was an era in colour. Though the moment does not make the man, the
moment certainly makes the Impressionist, and for the moment in
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: to the entreaties of his wife. He began to see how perilously
far he had gone in this business. He was drifting closer to it
every hour. Already he was entangled, already his foot was
caught in the mesh that was being spun. Sharply he recoiled.
Again all his instincts of honesty revolted. No, whatever
happened, he would preserve his integrity. His wife was right.
Always she had influenced his better side. At that moment,
Magnus's repugnance of the proposed political campaign was at its
pitch of intensity. He wondered how he had ever allowed himself
to so much as entertain the idea of joining with the others.
Now, he would wrench free, would, in a single instant of power,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment
in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed--a
wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman
peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary
marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It
was a room with which she had never been able to establish any
closer relation than that between a traveller and a railway
station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left
that other room--she was startled by the same sense of
strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints, the flowers, the
|
