| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: tone. They don't satisfy me, either. But they are not so tedious
as the Russian, and it is not unusual to find in them the chief
element of artistic creation -- the feeling of personal freedom
which is lacking in the Russian authors. I don't remember one new
book in which the author does not try from the first page to
entangle himself in all sorts of conditions and contracts with
his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body; another
ties himself up hand and foot in psychological analysis; a third
must have a "warm attitude to man"; a fourth purposely scrawls
whole descriptions of nature that he may not be suspected of
writing with a purpose. . . . One is bent upon being middle-class
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: The blood has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past,
no consideration of the future.
"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music
stopped; thinking, I am growing faint here, I shall be all
right in the open air. They stepped out into the cool, blue
air of the night.
Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians
had been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into
the cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.
"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.
She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. "How
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened.
Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in
the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight;
and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me
earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--
hidden out of sight somewhere.
"We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship
were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on.
We called at some more places with farcical names,
where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still
and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along
Heart of Darkness |
