| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: "The sole tribunal is Lady Coxon?"
"And any one she chooses to invite."
"But she has invited you," I noted.
"I'm not competent--I hate the thing. Besides, she hasn't," my
friend went on. "The real history of the matter, I take it, is
that the inspiration was originally Lady Coxon's own, that she
infected him with it, and that the flattering option left her is
simply his tribute to her beautiful, her aboriginal enthusiasm.
She came to England forty years ago, a thin transcendental
Bostonian, and even her odd happy frumpy Clockborough marriage
never really materialised her. She feels indeed that she has
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela: the room, formulating the official despatch he would send
off no later than today.
To His Honor the Minister for War,
General A. Blanquet,
Mexico City.
Sir:
I have the honor to inform your Excellency that on the
morning of . . . a rebel army, five hundred strong, com-
manded by . . . attacked this town, which I am charged
to defend. With such speed as the gravity of the situation
called for, I fortified my post in the town. The battle
The Underdogs |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: "And I can perceive its despair."
"Yes," she said, "this dune is a cloister,--a sublime cloister."
We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday
clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think
that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery,
he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other's
hands that we might feel the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions,
we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were
oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or
because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like
children, we held each other's hands; in fact, we could hardly have
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