| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: nothing of the kind; it was just as I had seen it
twenty times, steady and glaring from the bridge
of the tug. It was immovably set and hungry,
dominated like the whole man by the singleness of
one instinct.
He wanted to live. He had always wanted to
live. So we all do--but in us the instinct serves a
complex conception, and in him this instinct existed
alone. There is in such simple development a gi-
gantic force, and like the pathos of a child's naive
nd uncontrolled desire. He wanted that girl, and
Falk |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: a charming declivity, at the foot of which foamed and gurgled a little
brook, which I crossed on a culvert of mossy stones, superb in color,
the prettiest of all the mosaics which time manufactures. The avenue
continues by the brookside up a gentle rise. In the distance, the
first tableau is now seen,--a mill and its dam, a causeway and trees,
linen laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his
fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,--not to speak of
the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are
in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are
certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a
laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: of a bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.
The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the
language, and which should be called the odeur de pension. The
damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it
has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your
clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be mingled in it with
smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital.
It might be possible to describe it if some one should discover a
process by which to distil from the atmosphere all the nauseating
elements with which it is charged by the catarrhal exhalations of
every individual lodger, young or old. Yet, in spite of these
Father Goriot |
