| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: depth.
Would I have greater riches, I have but to walk a hundred yards
from my house, on the neighbouring plateau, once a shady forest,
today a dreary solitude where the Cricket browses and the Wheat-ear
flits from stone to stone. The love of lucre has laid waste the
land. Because wine paid handsomely, they pulled up the forest to
plant the vine. Then came the Phylloxera, the vine-stocks perished
and the once green table-land is now no more than a desolate
stretch where a few tufts of hardy grasses sprout among the
pebbles. This wasteland is the Lycosa's paradise: in an hour's
time, if need were, I should discover a hundred burrows within a
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: She had better do the old countrywoman: the Cottager's wife;
you had, indeed, Julia. Cottager's wife is a very pretty part,
I assure you. The old lady relieves the high-flown
benevolence of her husband with a good deal of spirit.
You shall be Cottager's wife."
"Cottager's wife!" cried Mr. Yates. "What are you
talking of? The most trivial, paltry, insignificant part;
the merest commonplace; not a tolerable speech in the whole.
Your sister do that! It is an insult to propose it.
At Ecclesford the governess was to have done it.
We all agreed that it could not be offered to anybody else.
Mansfield Park |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: flourish. A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen
snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for the hale
rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window-
panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes,
and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet
the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is of the
flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its
ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the
snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon
the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry
streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his
|
