| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: and pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The one thing
she hated in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way
in which Clara could come it over people. It enraged her that the
affairs of her son's big, barnlike house went on as well as they
did, and she used to feel that in this world we have to wait
overlong to see the guilty punished. "Suppose Johanna Vavrika died
or got sick?" the old lady used to say to Olaf. "Your wife
wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth." Olaf
only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did
not die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was
looking poorly, she was never ill. She seldom left the house,
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: she herself did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things
not fit for a man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my
bewilderment allowed me to grasp its naive atrociousness, it was
something like this: that no consideration, no delicacy, no
tenderness, no scruples should stand in the way of a woman (who by
the mere fact of her sex was the predestined victim of conditions
created by men's selfish passions, their vices and their abominable
tyranny) from taking the shortest cut towards securing for herself
the easiest possible existence. She had even the right to go out of
existence without considering anyone's feelings or convenience since
some women's existences were made impossible by the shortsighted
Chance |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: dreadful ink rubs off.) I have a strange kind of novel under
construction; it begins about 1660 and ends 1830, or perhaps
I may continue it to 1875 or so, with another life. One,
two, three, four, five, six generations, perhaps seven,
figure therein; two of my old stories, 'Delafield' and
'Shovel,' are incorporated; it is to be told in the third
person, with some of the brevity of history, some of the
detail of romance. THE SHOVELS OF NEWTON FRENCH will be the
name. The idea is an old one; it was brought to birth by an
accident; a friend in the islands who picked up F. Jenkin,
read a part, and said: 'Do you know, that's a strange book?
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