| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: to die in a few hours frequently bears on his
face a certain strange stamp of inevitable fate,
so that it is difficult for practised eyes to be
mistaken.
"You will die to-day!" I said to Vulich.
He turned towards me rapidly, but answered
slowly and quietly:
"May be so, may be not." . . .
Then, addressing himself to the major, he asked:
"Is the pistol loaded?"
The major, in the confusion, could not quite
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: bargains for his own, Dominicus was so much delayed on the road
that he chose to put up at a tavern, about five miles short of
Parker's Falls. After supper, lighting one of his prime cigars,
he seated himself in the bar-room, and went through the story of
the murder, which had grown so fast that it took him half an hour
to tell. There were as many as twenty people in the room,
nineteen of whom received it all for gospel. But the twentieth
was an elderly farmer, who had arrived on horseback a short time
before, and was now seated in a corner smoking his pipe. When the
story was concluded, he rose up very deliberately, brought his
chair right in front of Dominicus, and stared him full in the
Twice Told Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: letters. The woman, as you know, was Tullia, one of the /premiers
sujets/ of the Academie Royale de Musique. Tullia is merely a
pseudonym like du Bruel's name of de Cursy.
"For the ten years between 1817 and 1827 Tullia was in her glory on
the heights of the stage of the Opera. With more beauty than
education, a mediocre dancer with rather more sense than most of her
class, she took no part in the virtuous reforms which ruined the corps
de ballet; she continued the Guimard dynasty. She owed her ascendency,
moreover, to various well-known protectors, to the Duc de Rhetore (the
Due de Chaulieu's eldest son), to the influence of a famous
Superintendent of Fine Arts, and sundry diplomatists and rich
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