| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: unimportant psychically as if they were any other portion of the
furniture. They never stir us. We might live with them for fifty
years and be hardly able to tell, for any influence upon ourselves,
whether they existed or not. They remind us of that neutral drab
which certain religious sects assume to show their own irrelevancy
to the world. They are often most estimable folk, but they are no
more capable of inspiring a strong emotion than the other kind are
incapable of doing so. And we say the difference is due to the
personality or want of personality of the man. Now, in what does
this so-called personality consist? Not in bodily presence simply,
for men quite destitute of it possess the force in question; not in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: brought out. I said as I smoothed down my hat: "I know what to
think then. It's nothing!"
A remote disdainful pity for me gathered in her dim smile; then she
spoke in a voice that I hear at this hour: "It's my LIFE!" As I
stood at the door she added: "You've insulted him!"
"Do you mean Vereker?"
"I mean the Dead!"
I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge.
Yes, it was her life - I recognised that too; but her life none the
less made room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year
and a half after Corvick's death she published in a single volume
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur.
When she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile
he fell back and hid his face in his hands.
She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace,
said, "Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me.
My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together.
Come, my husband, come!"
There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the tinkling
of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of us who heard
the words addressed to another.
As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell, moving his hands from his face,
Dracula |
