| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: speaking style, and to walk on his own feet instead of on
academical stilts. There was never a man of letters with
more absolute command of his means; and we may say of him,
without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner
is tempted to explain it by some special richness or aptitude
in the dialect he wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and
completeness of description which gives us the very
physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is.
Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces,
which keeps him from any slip into the weariful trade of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Awakening & Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin: faced the cannon's mouth in days gone by. He resented the
intrusion of the children, who gaped with wondering eyes at him,
sitting so stiff up there in their mother's bright atelier. When
they drew near he motioned them away with an expressive action of
the foot, loath to disturb the fixed lines of his countenance, his
arms, or his rigid shoulders.
Edna, anxious to entertain him, invited Mademoiselle Reisz to
meet him, having promised him a treat in her piano playing; but
Mademoiselle declined the invitation. So together they attended a
soiree musicale at the Ratignolles'. Monsieur and Madame
Ratignolle made much of the Colonel, installing him as the guest of
Awakening & Selected Short Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Gather wood well filled with pitch, lay it in the form
and size of the altar at Opar in the center of the
clearing that the Flaming God may look down upon our
handiwork and be pleased."
During the balance of the day the priests of Opar were
busy erecting an altar in the center of the clearing,
and while they worked they chanted weird hymns in the
ancient tongue of that lost continent that lies at the
bottom of the Atlantic. They knew not the meanings of
the words they mouthed; they but repeated the ritual
that had been handed down from preceptor to neophyte
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar |
