| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding
the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and
extended to him half a loaf of white bread--'such
bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to
say.
"At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts
of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and
doubtful. 'Can you eat this?' she asked in her
soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for
a 'gracious lady.' He devoured ferociously, and
tears were falling on the crust. Suddenly he
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: After 1830 Beauvisage sold his business in hosiery to Jean Violette,
one of his agents (grandson of one of the chief witnesses for the
prosecution in the Simeuse trial), the proceeds of which amounted to
three hundred thousand francs. Monsieur and Madame Beauvisage had also
in prospect their double inheritance from old Grevin on one side, and
the old farmer's wife Beauvisage on the other. Great provincial
fortunes are usually the product of time multiplied by economy. Thirty
years of old age make capital.
In giving to Cecile-Renee a /dot/ of fifty thousand francs a year, her
parents still reserved for themselves the two inheritances, thirty
thousand a year on the Grand Livre, and their house in Arcis.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: chairs, they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and
bath; now the more arduous, more partial triumph over long rows of
books, black as ravens once, now white-stained, breeding pale mushrooms
and secreting furtive spiders. Once more, as she felt the tea warm in
her, the telescope fitted itself to Mrs McNab's eyes, and in a ring of
light she saw the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as
she came up with the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the
lawn. He never noticed her. Some said he was dead; some said she was
dead. Which was it? Mrs Bast didn't know for certain either. The
young gentleman was dead. That she was sure. She had read his name in
the papers.
To the Lighthouse |
