| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a
look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river
slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the
same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and
ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired
by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy
to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: to check the attack. They came at me from both sides. I was faint
and bleeding, and barely able to wield my spear--my last one. I
gave way by inches, retreating backward step by step, fighting with
the very end of my strength.
Suddenly Harry's voice came, shouting that they had reached
the end of the passage. I turned then and sprang desperately from
rock to rock after them, with the Incas crowding close after me.
I stumbled and nearly fell, but recovered my footing and
staggered on. And suddenly the mass of rocks ended abruptly, and
I fell forward onto flat, level ground by the side of Desiree and
Harry.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: of the place (whatever the issue) on the strength of any
respectable hint. It being thus the respectable hint that I had
with such avidity picked up, what would be the story to which it
would most inevitably form the centre? It is part of the charm
attendant on such questions that the "story," with the omens true,
as I say, puts on from this stage the authenticity of concrete
existence. It then is, essentially--it begins to be, though it may
more or less obscurely lurk, so that the point is not in the least
what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably,
where to put one's hand on it.
In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that
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