| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: for the hour when Ambrosch and Antonia would return
from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda at her work.
She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she wanted to keep warm
for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with feathers.
I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep it hot.
When the neighbours were there building the new house, they saw
her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept
their food in their featherbeds.
When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw
with her team. How much older she had grown in eight months!
She had come to us a child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl,
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: rising scribbler. There was even a relief, a simplification, in
that: liking him so much already for what he had done, how could
one have liked him any more for a perception which must at the best
have been vague? Paul Overt got up, trying to show his compassion,
but at the same instant he found himself encompassed by St.
George's happy personal art - a manner of which it was the essence
to conjure away false positions. It all took place in a moment.
Paul was conscious that he knew him now, conscious of his handshake
and of the very quality of his hand; of his face, seen nearer and
consequently seen better, of a general fraternising assurance, and
in particular of the circumstance that St. George didn't dislike
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: minds what, in the excitement of a new country, we
had forgotten,--that we were at last on the eastern slope,
and that before us waited the Inferno of the desert.
[1] In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced.
That evening we lay in the sweet ripe grasses of
Madulce, and talked of it. Wes had been across it
once before and did not possess much optimism with
which to comfort us.
"It's hot, just plain hot," said he, "and that's all
there is about it. And there's mighty little water,
and what there is is sickish and a long ways apart.
|
