| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: rest, every blest soul in England, will think you do - will think
you are keeping it up: upon my honour they will! I shall be one
of the two or three who know better. Now the question is whether
you can do it for two or three. Is that the stuff you're made of?"
It locked his guest a minute as in closed throbbing arms. "I could
do it for one, if you were the one."
"Don't say that; I don't deserve it; it scorches me," he protested
with eyes suddenly grave and glowing. "The 'one' is of course
one's self, one's conscience, one's idea, the singleness of one's
aim. I think of that pure spirit as a man thinks of a woman he has
in some detested hour of his youth loved and forsaken. She haunts
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: and field, the hairbreadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the
sufferings, too! I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the
traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful
plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance
looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen
running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure! "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I
should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to
the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."
Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous
donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not. Not ALL. I am thus
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: Where should we all be if we had to search into the origin of
fortunes? This is simply an affair of conscience. If you must
absolutely carry the case before some tribunal, go to that of the
confessional."
The Code incarnate ceased speaking, sat down, and drank a glass of
champagne. The man charged with the duty of explaining the gospel, the
good priest, rose.
"God has made us all frail beings," he said firmly. "If you love the
heiress of that crime, marry her; but content yourself with the
property she derives from her mother; give that of the father to the
poor."
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