| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.
He had summed up--he had judged. `The horror!' He was a remarkable man.
After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour,
it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper,
it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling
of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best--
a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain,
and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this
pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through.
True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge,
while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.
Heart of Darkness |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: thousand francs. But he had sent beforehand for several big furniture
vans.
"Once again he was fascinated by the beautiful furniture which a
wholesale dealer would have valued at six thousand francs. By the
fireside sat the wretched owner, yellow with jaundice, his head tied
up in a couple of printed handkerchiefs, and a cotton night-cap on top
of them; he was huddled up in wrappings like a chandelier, exhausted,
unable to speak, and altogether so knocked to pieces that the Count
was obliged to transact his business with the man-servant. When he had
paid down the four thousand francs, and the servant had taken the
money to his master for a receipt, Maxime turned to tell the man to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or
the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy,
which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a
cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his
puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of
crime as were demanded for his study.
Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the
moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of
improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest effort
and inevitable development,--as the bright and gorgeous flower,
The Snow Image |
