| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: "Of course, it's extremely distressing."
I looked at him inquisitively. What was distressing him? The
purloining of the son of the poet-tyrant by the daughter of the
financier-convict. Or only, if I may say so, the wind of their
flight disturbing the solemn placidity of the Fynes' domestic
atmosphere. My incertitude did not last long, for he added:
"Mrs. Fyne urges me to go to London at once."
One could guess at, almost see, his profound distaste for the
journey, his distress at a difference of feeling with his wife.
With his serious view of the sublunary comedy Fyne suffered from not
being able to agree solemnly with her sentiment as he was accustomed
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: 'My father!' he cried, in strange perplexity. 'Mamma never told me
I had a father. Where does he live? I'd rather stay with uncle.'
'He lives a little distance from the Grange,' I replied; 'just
beyond those hills: not so far, but you may walk over here when
you get hearty. And you should be glad to go home, and to see him.
You must try to love him, as you did your mother, and then he will
love you.'
'But why have I not heard of him before?' asked Linton. 'Why
didn't mamma and he live together, as other people do?'
'He had business to keep him in the north,' I answered, 'and your
mother's health required her to reside in the south.'
Wuthering Heights |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: thought; there are portraits which require the infusion of a soul, and
mean nothing unless the subtlest expression of the speaking
countenance is given; furthermore, there are things which we know not
how to say or do without the aid of secret harmonies which a day, an
hour, a fortunate conjunction of celestial signs, or an inward moral
tendency may produce.
Such mysterious revelations are imperatively needed in order to tell
this simple history, in which we seek to interest those souls that are
naturally grave and reflective and find their sustenance in tender
emotions. If the writer, like the surgeon beside his dying friend, is
filled with a species of reverence for the subject he is handling,
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