| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: Bruel, maker of vaudevilles, owed a snug little sinecure in the
Treasury.
Lucien had gone from surprise to surprise since the dinner at
Flicoteaux's. For two months Literature had meant a life of poverty
and want; in Lousteau's room he had seen it at its cynical worst; in
the Wooden Galleries he had met Literature abject and Literature
insolent. The sharp contrasts of heights and depths; of compromise
with conscience; of supreme power and want of principle; of treachery
and pleasure; of mental elevation and bondage--all this made his head
swim, he seemed to be watching some strange unheard-of drama.
Finot was talking with the manager. "Do you think du Bruel's piece
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in a
face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest painter's
touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it. And if it is
hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair pencils, you may think
how hopeless it must be to pursue after it with clumsy words. If I
say, for instance, that this look, which I remember as Lizzie, was
something wistful that seemed partly to come of slyness and in part
of simplicity, and that I am inclined to imagine it had something to
do with the daintiest suspicion of a cast in one of her large eyes, I
shall have said all that I can, and the reader will not be much
advanced towards comprehension. I had struck up an acquaintance with
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: hastily and partially disposed around those of the chapel, and
mingled inconsistently with scutcheons and funeral emblems of the
dead, which they elsewhere exhibited. On each side of the stone
altar was a monument, the appearance of which formed an equally
strange contrast. On the one was the figure, in stone, of some
grim hermit, or monk, who had died in the odour of sanctity; he
was represented as recumbent, in his cowl and scapulaire, with
his face turned upward as in the act of devotion, and his hands
folded, from which his string of beads was dependent. On the
other side was a tomb, in the Italian taste, composed of the most
beautiful statuary marble, and accounted a model of modern art.
|
