| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine,
you who have derided your superiors--behold!"
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry
followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on,
staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I
looked there came, I thought, a change--he seemed to swell--
his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and
alter--and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped
back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that
prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: slightly to Gazonal, who bent low as before a man of genius.
"So you have elected Stidmann in place of--" he began.
"How could I help it? I wasn't there," replied Lora.
"You bring the Academy into disrepute," continued the painter. "To
choose such a man as that! I don't wish to say ill of him, but he
works at a trade. Where are you dragging the first of arts,--the art
those works are the most lasting; bringing nations to light of which
the world has long lost even the memory; an art which crowns and
consecrates great men? Yes, sculpture is priesthood; it preserves the
ideas of an epoch, and you give its chair to a maker of toys and
mantelpieces, an ornamentationist, a seller of bric-a-brac! Ah! as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: taken at the flood . . . and so on. Personally I
am still on the look out for that important turn.
I am, however, afraid that most of us are fated to
flounder for ever in the dead water of a pool whose
shores are arid indeed. But I know that there are
often in men's affairs unexpectedly--even irration-
ally--illuminating moments when an otherwise in-
significant sound, perhaps only some perfectly com-
monplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the
unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our compla-
cency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking
Falk |
