| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: the instant, swept off the wine and loaf to the
cupboard, and then, coming back for the platter I had
used, took it, opened the back door, and went out,
leaving the door ajar. The draught which came in beat
the flame of the lamp this way and that, and gave the
dingy, gloomy room an air still more miserable. I rose
angrily from the fire, and went to the door, intending
to close it with a bang.
But when I reached it, I saw something, between door and
jamb, which stayed my hand. The door led to a shed in
which the housewife washed pots and the like. I felt
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: simply to expose the plague-sores upon it. We listened to just such a
pamphlet as Rameau's Nephew, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the
course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which
the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken
for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save
the sceptic's adopted article of belief--the omnipotence, omniscience,
and universal applicability of money.
After some target practice at the outer circle of their acquaintances,
they turned their ill-natured shafts at their intimate friends. With a
sign I explained my wish to stay and listen as soon as Bixiou took up
his parable, as will shortly be seen. And so we listened to one of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.
Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know;
but the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.
"In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighbourhood,
and his eyes had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat
paunch with ostentation on his short legs, and during the time
his gang infested the station spoke to no one but his nephew.
You could see these two roaming about all day long with their
heads close together in an everlasting confab.
"I had given up worrying myself about the rivets.
One's capacity for that kind of folly is more limited than
Heart of Darkness |
