| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among us.
It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward
than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me,
moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary
than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph,
I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in truth
have been, I now reflect, that I didn't in these days hate them!
Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed,
finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived.
I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings
to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: "Here come I, a Turkish Knight,
Who learnt in Turkish land to fight;
I'll fight this man with courage bold:
If his blood's hot I'll make it cold!"
During her declamation Eustacia held her head erect,
and spoke as roughly as she could, feeling pretty secure
from observation. But the concentration upon her part
necessary to prevent discovery, the newness of the scene,
the shine of the candles, and the confusing effect upon
her vision of the ribboned visor which hid her features,
left her absolutely unable to perceive who were present
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: Come, stand up; don't grovel there. Stand up, you lump of
iniquity!'
He scrambled to his feet. He was utterly unmanned, or it might
have gone hard with me yet; and I considered him hesitating, as,
indeed, there was cause. The man was a double-dyed traitor: he had
tried to murder me, and I had first baffled his endeavours and then
exposed and insulted him. Was it wise to place myself any longer
at his mercy? With his help I should doubtless travel more
quickly; doubtless also far less agreeably; and there was
everything to show that it would be at a greater risk. In short, I
should have washed my hands of him on the spot, but for the
|
