The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: box of carved cedarwood, she set it up on a frame, and burned
vervain on lighted charcoal before it, and peered through the coils
of the smoke. And after a time she clenched her hands in anger.
'He should have been mine,' she muttered, 'I am as fair as she is.'
And that evening, when the moon had risen, the young Fisherman
climbed up to the top of the mountain, and stood under the branches
of the hornbeam. Like a targe of polished metal the round sea lay
at his feet, and the shadows of the fishing-boats moved in the
little bay. A great owl, with yellow sulphurous eyes, called to
him by his name, but he made it no answer. A black dog ran towards
him and snarled. He struck it with a rod of willow, and it went
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of
their natures and perhaps must remain for ever obscure even to
themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
personalities are remotely derived.
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme
master of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of
authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety
towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a
writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own
Some Reminiscences |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: its kind. As it was, however, when viewed from his favourite
point against the garden railings, and with some touch of
distance, it caused a pleasurable rising of the artist's
heart. 'I have thrown away,' he ejaculated, 'an invaluable
motive; and this shall be the subject of my first academy
picture.'
The fate of neither of these works was equal to its merit. A
crowd would certainly, from time to time, collect before the
area-railings; but they came to jeer and not to speculate;
and those who pushed their inquiries further, were too
plainly animated by the spirit of derision. The racier of
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