| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: what our house is. You wouldn't be happy either, if you didn't do
something. It isn't that I haven't the time at home--it's the
atmosphere." Here, presumably, she imagined that her cousin, who had
listened with his usual intelligent sympathy, raised his eyebrows a
little, and interposed:
"Well, but what do you want to do?"
Even in this purely imaginary dialogue, Katharine found it difficult
to confide her ambition to an imaginary companion.
"I should like," she began, and hesitated quite a long time before she
forced herself to add, with a change of voice, "to study
mathematics--to know about the stars."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every
circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the
LAND in the High Street. The building had grown rotten
to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up
so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and
reverberations sounded through the house at night; the
inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed
their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had
even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and
returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-
respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: tetrarch was weary of pondering on this troublesome matter.
The mountain peaks surrounding the palace, looking like great
petrified waves, the black depths among the cliffs, the immensity of
the blue sky, the rising sun, and the gloomy valley of the abyss,
filled the soul of Antipas with a vague unrest; he felt an
overwhelming sense of oppression at the sight of the desert, whose
uneven piles of sand suggested crumbling ampitheatres or ruined
palaces. The hot wind brought an odour of sulphur, as if it had rolled
up from cities accursed and buried deeper than the river-bed of the
slow-running Jordan.
These aspects of nature, which seemed to his troubled fancy signs of
Herodias |
