| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: most palpable, which seemed to enter one's breast
with the breath of one's nostrils and soak into one's
limbs through every pore of one's skin.
The ridiculous victim of jealousy had for some
reason or other to stop his engines just then. The
steamer drifted slowly up with the tide. Oblivious
of my new surroundings I walked the deck, in anx-
ious, deadened abstraction, a commingling of
romantic reverie with a very practical survey of
my qualifications. For the time was approaching
for me to behold my command and to prove my
The Shadow Line |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: arrangement of her neatly brushed chestnut hair in a double curve on
her forehead lent a refined expression to blue eyes, clear as crystal.
The broad daylight streaming in through the short curtains against the
window pane fell with softened light on her girlish face. A pile of
shaped pieces of linen told me that she was a sempstress. She looked
like a spirit of solitude. When I held out the bill, I remarked that
she had not been at home when I called in the morning.
" ' "But the money was left with the porter's wife," said she.
" 'I pretended not to understand.
" ' "You go out early, mademoiselle, it seems."
" ' "I very seldom leave my room; but when you work all night, you are
Gobseck |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: outskirts of the village.
'Why not stay the night?' Isay shouted after them.
But Vasili Andreevich did not answer and touched up the horse.
Four miles of good road, two of which lay through the forest,
seemed easy to manage, especially as the wind was apparently
quieter and the snow had stopped.
Having driven along the trodden village street, darkened here
and there by fresh manure, past the yard where the clothes hung
out and where the white shirt had broken loose and was now
attached only by one frozen sleeve, they again came within
sound of the weird moan of the willows, and again emerged on
Master and Man |
