| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: under the spell of its more conspicuous wonders--the brick
palaces flinging out their wrought-iron torch-holders with a
gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great council-chamber
emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope Julius on
the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the dusk
of mouldering chapels--and it was only when his first hunger was
appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was
still untasted.
He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room,
with a nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man
with lustrous eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm the first to rise, or I'm a
long way behind time!"
Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution
results in bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these
people are now, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point
at which we all set out. They are still in that childish state of
development before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet
simplicity of nature. An impersonal race seems never to have fully
grown up.
Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive
feature of the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: July 5th, 1922." But I can still read the gray names, and they will give
you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted
Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing
whatever about him.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a
man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who
was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie
Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a
corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near.
And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr.
Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned
The Great Gatsby |
