| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: wore an expression of unutterable heaviness.
'You don't hear many songs, do you, Mr. Smith, to take so much
notice of these of mine?'
'Perhaps it was the means and vehicle of the song that I was
noticing: I mean yourself,' he answered gently.
'Now, Mr. Smith!'
'It is perfectly true; I don't hear much singing. You mistake
what I am, I fancy. Because I come as a stranger to a secluded
spot, you think I must needs come from a life of bustle, and know
the latest movements of the day. But I don't. My life is as
quiet as yours, and more solitary; solitary as death.'
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: men were but nine in all, and only five of them had fusees with
them; the rest had pistols and swords, indeed, but they were of
small use to them.
We took up seven of our men, and with difficulty enough too, three
of them being very ill wounded; and that which was still worse was,
that while we stood in the boat to take our men in, we were in as
much danger as they were in on shore; for they poured their arrows
in upon us so thick that we were glad to barricade the side of the
boat up with the benches, and two or three loose boards which, to
our great satisfaction, we had by mere accident in the boat. And
yet, had it been daylight, they are, it seems, such exact marksmen,
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: short, of having within himself a cold and disinterested other self,
who looks on as a spectator at all the changes of life, noting our
passions and our sentiments, and whispering to us in every case the
judgment of a sort of moral ready-reckoner."
"That explains why a statesman is so rare a thing in France," said old
Lord Dudley.
"From a sentimental point of view, this is horrible," the Minister
went on. "Hence, when such a phenomenon is seen in a young man--
Richelieu, who, when warned overnight by a letter of Concini's peril,
slept till midday, when his benefactor was killed at ten o'clock--or
say Pitt, or Napoleon, he was a monster. I became such a monster at a
|
