| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: and plaster which are common in Paris houses.
Our room, a little over seven feet high, was hung with a vile cheap
paper sprigged with blue. The floor was painted, and knew nothing of
the polish given by the /frotteur's/ brush. By our beds there was only
a scrap of thin carpet. The chimney opened immediately to the roof,
and smoked so abominably that we were obliged to provide a stove at
our own expense. Our beds were mere painted wooden cribs like those in
schools; on the chimney shelf there were but two brass candlesticks,
with or without tallow candles in them, and our two pipes with some
tobacco in a pouch or strewn abroad, also the little piles of cigar-
ash left there by our visitors or ourselves.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: crazy staging, with a wry windless on the top; and clambering
up, we could look into an open shaft, leading edgeways down
into the bowels of the mountain, trickling with water, and
lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not. In that
quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was
loudly audible. Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into
the superincumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open;
and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the
strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half
undermined, precariously nodding on the verge. Here also a
rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: Thereupon, with the same absence of any sort of sustaining
spirit, he declared his intention to select a fat bird and send
him on board for us not later than next day.
I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as
if it were a sort of court decoration given only to the tried
friends of the house. I had expected more pomp in the ceremony.
The gift had surely its special quality, multiple and rare. From
the only flock on the East Coast! He did not make half enough of
it. That man did not understand his opportunities. However, I
thanked him at some length.
"You see," he interrupted, abruptly, in a very peculiar tone,
A Personal Record |
