| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: "The only geese on the East Coast," Almayer informed me, in a
perfunctory mutter without a spark of faith, hope, or pride.
Thereupon, with the same absence of any sort of sustaining
spirit, he declared his intention to select a fat bird and send
him on board for us not later than next day.
I had heard of these largesses before. He conferred a goose as
if it were a sort of court decoration given only to the tried
friends of the house. I had expected more pomp in the ceremony.
The gift had surely its special quality, multiple and rare. From
the only flock on the East Coast! He did not make half enough of
it. That man did not understand his opportunities. However, I
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: was an utter egoist of bricks and mortar. He had dropped out, he felt,
into open space for a time, and all it contained was an audience for
his reminiscences. Neither the limitless freedom of the prairie days
nor the grand hush of the close-drawn, spangled nights touched him.
All the hues of Aurora could not win him from the pink pages of a
sporting journal. "Get something for nothing," was his mission in
life; "Thirty-seventh" Street was his goal.
Nearly two months after his arrival he began to complain that he felt
worse. It was then that he became the ranch's incubus, its harpy, its
Old Man of the Sea. He shut himself in his room like some venomous
kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing.
Heart of the West |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: jumped out like a bird. By him the old man looks like some stone saint
in the Cathedral.--They are going to the old School of the Four
Nations. Presto! they are out of sight.--And this is where he lives,
poor cherub!" she went on, looking about the room. "How smart and
winning he is! Ah! your fine gentry are made of other stuff than we
are."
And Jacqueline went down again after smoothing down the bed-coverlet,
dusting the chest, and wondering for the hundredth time in six months:
"What in the world does he do all the blessed day? He cannot always be
staring at the blue sky and the stars that God has hung up there like
lanterns. That dear boy has known trouble. But why do he and the old
|
