| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: certainly going to play me some spiteful trick.--Madame," he said,
"you have, I am told, undertaken the charge of a very precious
treasure."
"Do you take me for a dragon?" said the old lady. "But of whom are you
speaking?" she added, with a sweetness which revived Martial's hopes.
"Of that little lady, unknown to all, whom the jealousy of all these
coquettes has imprisoned in that corner. You, no doubt, know her
family?"
"Yes," said the Duchess. "But what concern have you with a provincial
heiress, married some time since, a woman of good birth, whom you none
of you know, you men; she goes nowhere."
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: woman turned toward him, -- her faint gaze fixed upon the letter. "Shall I
burn it for you?" he asked. She bowed before him. "It shall be burned in
the temple this very morning," he promised;-- "and no one shall read it,
except myself." The figure smiled and vanished.
Dawn was breaking as the priest descended the stairs, to find the family
waiting anxiously below. "Do not be anxious," he said to them: "She will
not appear again." And she never did.
The letter was burned. It was a love-letter written to O-Sono in the time
of her studies at Kyoto. But the priest alone knew what was in it; and the
secret died with him.
YUKI-ONNA
Kwaidan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that
our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by
her mother's death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept
from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to
plunge them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were
striking, they were promising, but they didn't unveil the idol.
That great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his
climax. She said nothing more, nothing to enlighten me as to the
state of her own knowledge - the knowledge for the acquisition of
which I had fancied her prodigiously acting. This was above all
what I wanted to know: had SHE seen the idol unveiled? Had there
|
