| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: his grate. He went through his day, from his uprising to his evening
coughing-fit, with the regularity of a pendulum, and in some sort was
a clockwork man, wound up by a night's slumber. Touch a wood-louse on
an excursion across your sheet of paper, and the creature shams death;
and in something the same way my acquaintance would stop short in the
middle of a sentence, while a cart went by, to save the strain to his
voice. Following the example of Fontenelle, he was thrifty of pulse-
strokes, and concentrated all human sensibility in the innermost
sanctuary of Self.
"His life flowed soundless as the sands of an hour-glass. His victims
sometimes flew into a rage and made a great deal of noise, followed by
Gobseck |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: in Father's time! Who is talked of in the whole district now?
Brekhunov! And why? Because I stick to business. I take
trouble, not like others who lie abed or waste their time on
foolishness while I don't sleep of nights. Blizzard or no
blizzard I start out. So business gets done. They think
money-making is a joke. No, take pains and rack your brains!
You get overtaken out of doors at night, like this, or keep
awake night after night till the thoughts whirling in your head
make the pillow turn,' he meditated with pride. 'They think
people get on through luck. After all, the Mironovs are now
millionaires. And why? Take pains and God gives. If only He
Master and Man |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: not the fault of the conscious smile which seemed a reference to
the lady's expensive identity, it was not the fault of this
demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if
the allusion didn't sound rather vulgar. This was exactly because
she became still more gracious to reply: "Oh I can assure you that
all that will be quite regular."
Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what "all that"
was to amount to - people had such different ideas. Mrs. Moreen's
words, however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite
enough to elicit from the child a strange little comment in the
shape of the mocking foreign ejaculation "Oh la-la!"
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