| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: incomplete studies, he came to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to
drink of science at its highest fount. The old priest, being very fond
of his nephew, left Louis free to spend his whole little inheritance
in his three years' stay in Paris, though he lived very poorly. This
fortune consisted of but a few thousand francs.
Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris
by the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must
often have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of
mind by which artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle
recollected, and the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis
Lambert wrote to him at that time, perhaps because it was the last and
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she
became a schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it. She had
once had a father and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big
flat near the Red Gate, but of all that life there was left in
her memory only something vague and fluid like a dream. Her
father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had
died soon after. . . . She had a brother, an officer; at first
they used to write to each other, then her brother had given up
answering her letters, he had got out of the way of writing. Of
her old belongings, all that was left was a photograph of her
mother, but it had grown dim from the dampness of the school, and
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: wither the interpretation she had imposed upon him. She was
finding much comfort in this task of reconstruction. She had
gathered together in the drawingroom every presentable
portrait she had been able to find of him. He had never, she
said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil sketch
done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a
number of photographs, several of which--she wanted the
doctor's advice upon this point--she thought might be
enlarged; there was a statuette done by some woman artist who
had once beguiled him into a sitting. There was also a
painting she had had worked up from a photograph and some
|
