| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: was eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and
during that beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing
melodies and most elaborate /barcarolles/. In fact, he exhausted every
resource of the stage management of love, to use an expression
borrowed from the theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of
his manoeuvres.
"If that woman ever forgets me!" he would sometimes say to himself as
they returned together from a long walk in the woods, "I will owe her
no grudge--she will have found something better."
When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting
score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected.
"Joe's" had the additional advantage of seclusion from curious
upper-class eyes, so at four each afternoon Amory, accompanied by
friend or book, went up to experiment with his digestion. One day
in March, finding that all the tables were occupied, he slipped
into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at
the last table. They nodded briefly. For twenty minutes Amory sat
consuming bacon buns and reading "Mrs. Warren's Profession" (he
had discovered Shaw quite by accident while browsing in the
library during mid-years); the other freshman, also intent on his
volume, meanwhile did away with a trio of chocolate malted milks.
This Side of Paradise |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came
on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats--ere going
in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction--the
ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate
till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from
it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded
all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing boat; kindling a
fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the
look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance
to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though
she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and
Moby Dick |
