| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum: themselves up, their first act was to turn Tik-Tok
on his back and put a heavy diamond on top of him,
so that he could not get up again. Then they
carefully put his gun in a corner of the cavern
and the King sent Guph to fetch the Long-Eared
Hearer.
The Hearer was still angry at Ruggedo for
breaking his ear, but he acknowledged the Nome
King to be his master and was ready to obey his
commands. Therefore he repeated Shaggy's speech to
the King, who at once realized that his Kingdom
Tik-Tok of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-
work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When
he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can
write becomes a journalist and a hack.
The life he leads is not unpleasing. Blue-stockings, beginners in
every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career,
publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready
pen. Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any
expense beyond paying his rent. He had boxes at all the theatres; the
sale of the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his gloves;
and he would say to those authors who published at their own expense,
The Muse of the Department |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: have flung the stems of fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the
projecting reefs, around and beneath which the surges roar
incessantly. This dangerous entrance to the little bay bears obliquely
to the right with a serpentine movement, and there encounters a
mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level, the
base of which is a vertical palisade of solid rock more than a mile
and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere yielding to clefts or
undulations until it reaches a height of two hundred feet above the
water. Rushing violently in, the sea is driven back with equal
violence by the inert force of the mountain to the opposite shore,
gently curved by the spent force of the retreating waves.
Seraphita |
