| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: for he wanted her, he longed for her, he loved her--with her muddy
stockings, her slipshod feet, her straw bonnet! He wanted her in the
very house where he had seen her go in.
"Am I bewitched by vice, then?" he asked himself in dismay. "Nay, I
have not yet reached that point. I am but three-and-twenty, and there
is nothing of the senile fop about me."
The very vehemence of the whim that held possession of him to some
extent reassured him. This strange struggle, these reflections, and
this love in pursuit may perhaps puzzle some persons who are
accustomed to the ways of Paris life; but they may be reminded that
Count Andrea Marcosini was not a Frenchman.
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: dressed, I did not look very different from the many young fellows there. I
scanned all the faces, but did not see Dick's, nor, for that matter, the
Mexican's. Both disappointed and relieved, I turned away, for the picture
of low dissipation was not attractive.
The hum of the great sawmill drew me like a magnet. I went out to the
lumber-yard at the back of the mill, where a trestle slanted down to a pond
full of logs. A train loaded with pines had just pulled in, and dozens of
men were rolling logs off the flat-cars into a canal. At stations along the
canal stood others pike-poling the logs toward the trestle, where an
endless chain caught them with sharp claws and hauled them up. Half-way
from, the ground they were washed clean by a circle of water-spouts.
The Young Forester |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: have heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a wind when so
loaded as to float a couple of inches by the head.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground
of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts
of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the
Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled
ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set
ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging
slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master
stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his
chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in
The Mirror of the Sea |
