| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: carrying the sack close to his side. Once he looked
critically at the sky.
"I bet it'll rain to-morrow," he muttered, "if this wind
works round to the south."
Once in his little den behind the music store, he washed his
hands and forearms, and put on his working clothes, blue
overalls and a jumper, over cheap trousers and vest. Then
he got together his small belongings--an old campaign hat, a
pair of boots, a tin of tobacco, and a pinchbeck bracelet
which he had found one Sunday in the Park, and which he
believed to be valuable. He stripped his blanket from his
McTeague |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: compelled to stifle their longings. And yet, in spite of himself, he
broke the silence to say in a faltering voice:
"Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest emotions of my
life, and own to all that you have made me feel. You set the heart in
me swelling high! I feel within me a longing to make you forget your
mortifications, to devote my life to this, to give you love for all
who ever have given you wounds or hate. But this is a very sudden
outpouring of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I ought
not----"
"Enough, monsieur," said Mme. de Beauseant; "we have both of us gone
too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a refusal which I am
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: A dirge for the sundered years and a dirge for the years to be!
Better his end had been as the end of a cloudless day,
Bright, by the word of Zeus, with a golden star,
Wrought of a golden fame, and flung to the central sky,
To gleam on a stormless tomb for evermore: --
Whether or not there fell
To the touch of an alien hand
The sheen of his purple robe and the shine of his diadem,
Better his end had been
To die as an old man dies, --
But the fates are ever the fates, and a crown is ever a crown.
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