| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your eye;
the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the
summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh
slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no relation, and
might be in another sphere. Here there are none of those delicate
gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and spreadings-out into
the distance, nothing of that art of air and light by which the face
of nature explains and veils itself in climes which we may be allowed
to think more lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where everything
that is not white is a solecism and defies the judgment of the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: All is not lost--the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who, from the terror of this arm, so late
Doubted his empire--that were low indeed;
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since, by fate, the strength of Gods,
Paradise Lost |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household
had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak
of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers
and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs
from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river
under the great bridges, and the life of art and study
and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting.
Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as
he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate:
a mere grey speck of a man compared with the
ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being. . . .
|
