| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: upon a perfectly harmless, naive, usual, inefficient specimen of
respectable governess for his daughter; or on a commonplace silly
adventuress who would have tried, say, to marry him or work some
other sort of common mischief in a small way. Or again he might
have chanced on a model of all the virtues, or the repository of all
knowledge, or anything equally harmless, conventional, and middle
class. All calculations were in his favour; but, chance being
incalculable, he fell upon an individuality whom it is much easier
to define by opprobrious names than to classify in a calm and
scientific spirit--but an individuality certainly, and a temperament
as well. Rare? No. There is a certain amount of what I would
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: and handled it as if he knew something about its make. The
two watchers had inwardly started at his coming, and
Elizabeth left the window, went to the back of the room, and
stood as if absorbed in the panelling of the wall. She
hardly knew that she had done this till Lucetta, animated by
the conjunction of her new attire with the sight of Farfrae,
spoke out: "Let us go and look at the instrument, whatever
it is."
Elizabeth-Jane's bonnet and shawl were pitchforked on in a
moment, and they went out. Among all the agriculturists
gathered round the only appropriate possessor of the new
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: little below to the north. A very considerable bombardment was
going on and it reverberated finely. (It is only among mountains
that one hears anything that one can call the thunder of guns.
The heaviest bombardments I heard in France sounded merely like
Brock's benefit on a much large scale, and disappointed me
extremely.) As I sat and listened to the uproar and watched the
shells burst on Cimone and far away up the valley over
Castelletto above Pedescala, Captain Pirelli pointed out the
position of the Austrian frontier. I doubt if the English people
realise that the utmost depth to which this great Trentino
offensive, which exhausted Austria, wasted the flower of the
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