| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: inevitably alternated to say she thought she had better go in.
It was almost as if she were waiting for something--something I
might say to her--and intended to give me my opportunity.
I was the more struck by this as she told me that her aunt
had been less well for a good many days and in a way that was
rather new. She was weaker; at moments it seemed as if she
had no strength at all; yet more than ever before she wished
to be left alone. That was why she had told her to come out--
not even to remain in her own room, which was alongside;
she said her niece irritated her, made her nervous.
She sat still for hours together, as if she were asleep;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of
tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the
world concealed something--most affectations conceal something
eventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I found
what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she
left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied
about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded
me that night at Daisy's. At her first big golf tournament there was a
row that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved
her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached
the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted his
The Great Gatsby |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: bought a pistol, saying he was going to shoot a dog, and adding that
he `thought he would take a shot at an old cat while he was about it.'
(Here the children interrupted Rudolph's narrative by smothered giggles.)
Cutter went out behind the hardware store, put up a target,
practised for an hour or so, and then went home. At six
o'clock that evening, when several men were passing the Cutter
house on their way home to supper, they heard a pistol shot.
They paused and were looking doubtfully at one another,
when another shot came crashing through an upstairs window.
They ran into the house and found Wick Cutter lying on
a sofa in his upstairs bedroom, with his throat torn open,
My Antonia |
