| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: mustn't see me with tear-stained eyes. I'll go and wash. Yes,
yes; did I do my hair or not?" she asked herself. And she could
not remember. She felt her head with her hand. "Yes, my hair has
been done, but when I did it I can'; in the least remember." She
could not believe the evidence of her hand, and went up to the
pier-glass to see whether she really had done her hair. She
certainly had, but she could not think when she had done it.
"Who's that?" she thought, looking in the looking-glass at the
swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, that looked in a
scared way at her. "Why, it's I!" she suddenly understood, and
looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her,
Anna Karenina |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: spectacle of a shameless middle-aged man abducting headlong into the
upper regions of a respectable hotel a terrified young girl
obviously under age, I don't know. And Fyne (he told me so) did not
care for what people might think. All he wanted was to reach his
wife before the girl collapsed. For a time she ran with him but at
the last flight of stairs he had to seize and half drag, half carry
her to his wife. Mrs. Fyne waited at the door with her quite
unmoved physiognomy and her readiness to confront any sort of
responsibility, which already characterized her, long before she
became a ruthless theorist. Relieved, his mission accomplished,
Fyne closed hastily the door of the sitting-room.
Chance |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: different inclinations which they must constantly raise
in him that contemplates them, a more striking example
cannot easily be found than two Greek epigrammatists
will afford us in their accounts of
human life, which I shall lay before the reader in
English prose.
Posidippus, a comick poet, utters this complaint:
"Through which of the paths of life is it eligible to
pass? In public assemblies are debates and troublesome
affairs: domestick privacies are haunted with
anxieties; in the country is labour; on the sea is
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