| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: can."
Nekhludoff left the study, and went into the office again. Just
as in the Senate office, he saw, in a splendid apartment, a
number of very elegant officials, clean, polite, severely correct
and distinguished in dress and in speech.
"How many there are of them; how very many and how well fed they
all look! And what clean shirts and hands they all have, and how
well all their boots are polished! Who does it for them? How
comfortable they all are, as compared not only with the
prisoners, but even with the peasants!" These thoughts again
involuntarily came to Nekhludoff's mind.
Resurrection |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: We knew we were twins of one womb; she never dreamed of a half-
confidence between brothers of the same blood. After a short sigh,
natural to pure hearts when they first open to each other, she told me
of her first married life, her deceptions and disillusions, the
rebirth of her childhood's misery. Like me, she had suffered under
trifles; mighty to souls whose limpid substance quivers to the least
shock, as a lake quivers on the surface and to its utmost depths when
a stone is flung into it. When she married she possessed some girlish
savings; a little gold, the fruit of happy hours and repressed
fancies. These, in a moment when they were needed, she gave to her
husband, not telling him they were gifts and savings of her own. He
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had
never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing.
I didn't say to myself, `Now I will never see him,'
or `Now I will never shake him by the hand,' but, `Now I
will never hear him.' The man presented himself as a voice.
Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action.
Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration
that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory
than all the other agents together? That was not the point.
The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his
gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it
Heart of Darkness |
