| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: lichens, where they had said to each other so many precious things, so
many trifles, where they had built the pretty castles of their future
home. She thought of the future now as she looked upward to the bit of
sky which was all the high walls suffered her to see; then she turned
her eyes to the angle where the sun crept on, and to the roof above
the room in which he had slept. Hers was the solitary love, the
persistent love, which glides into every thought and becomes the
substance, or, as our fathers might have said, the tissue of life.
When the would-be friends of Pere Grandet came in the evening for
their game at cards, she was gay and dissimulating; but all the
morning she talked of Charles with her mother and Nanon. Nanon had
Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: "No, no, sir! think of other subjects, and speak of other things,
and in another strain. Don't address me as if I were a beauty; I am
your plain, Quakerish governess."
"You are a beauty in my eyes, and a beauty just after the desire of
my heart,--delicate and aerial."
"Puny and insignificant, you mean. You are dreaming, sir,--or you
are sneering. For God's sake don't be ironical!"
"I will make the world acknowledge you a beauty, too," he went on,
while I really became uneasy at the strain he had adopted, because I
felt he was either deluding himself or trying to delude me. "I will
attire my Jane in satin and lace, and she shall have roses in her
Jane Eyre |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in
Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before,
but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds;
where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog
that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically
at its stout chaim.
Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect
copy of Dr Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed
him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began
to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain
passage which would have come on the 751st page of his own defective
The Dunwich Horror |
