| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: how happy it made her. Her eyes, full of languor, turned still more
gently than the day before toward the Provencal, who talked to her as
one would to a tame animal.
"Ah! mademoiselle, you are a nice girl, aren't you? Just look at that!
So we like to be made much of, don't we? Aren't you ashamed of
yourself? So you have been eating some Arab or other, have you? That
doesn't matter. They're animals just the same as you are; but don't
you take to eating Frenchmen, or I shan't like you any longer."
She played like a dog with its master, letting herself be rolled over,
knocked about, and stroked, alternately; sometimes she herself would
provoke the soldier, putting up her paw with a soliciting gesture.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: head and his thumb gashed my lips and went into my mouth. The
impact almost knocked me over, but my teeth had closed on his
thumb and when he jerked back he put me on my balance again. I
clouted him on the jaw and knocked him down. He landed in the
lime box. The school had not yet been plastered, and the
quicklime was in an open pit. I started in after the bully, but
stopped to save my pants from the lime. There was a hose near by,
and I turned the water on Babe in the lime bath. The lime
completely covered him. He was whipped and in fear of his life.
Choking and weeping he hollered, "Nuff." We got him out, too weak
to stand, and gently leaned him up in a corner of the school
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands
there, the only reality in an invented world, among imaginary
things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only
writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He
remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a
suspected rather than a seen presence--a movement and a voice
behind the draperies of fiction. In these personal notes there is
no such veil. And I cannot help thinking of a passage in the
"Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so
profoundly, says that "there are persons esteemed on their
reputation who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had
A Personal Record |
