| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: music, a banquet, young and lovely women with fair faces and dark
tresses, all the pleasure of life! Bid them wait for me; for I am
about to begin life anew."
"The delirium is at its height," said Don Juan to himself.
"I have found out a way of coming to life again," the speaker
went on. "There, just look in that table drawer, press the spring
hidden by the griffin, and it will fly open."
"I have found it, father."
"Well, then, now take out a little phial of rock crystal."
"I have it."
"I have spent twenty years in----" but even as he spoke the old
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: thing she hated, as she painted her on this very spot. "Shag tobacco,"
he said, "fivepence an ounce," parading his poverty, his principles.
(But the war had drawn the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one
thought, poor devils, of both sexes.) He was always carrying a book
about under his arm--a purple book. He "worked." He sat, she
remembered, working in a blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in
the middle of the view. But after all, she reflected, there was the
scene on the beach. One must remember that. It was a windy morning.
They had all gone down to the beach. Mrs Ramsay sat down and wrote
letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. "Oh," she said, looking up at
something floating in the sea, "is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned
To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immi-
grants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of
mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with
amazing subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently
far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their prepara-
tions with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instru-
ments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble
far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli
War of the Worlds |
