| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: evidence was derived of the prodigious faculties at the command of the
Being of Action, which, according to Lambert, can abstract itself
completely from the Being of Reaction, bursting its envelope, and
piercing walls by its potent vision; a phenomenon known to the
Hindoos, as missionaries tell us, by the name of /Tokeiad/; or again,
by another faculty, can grasp in the brain, in spite of its closest
convolutions, the ideas which are formed or forming there, and the
whole of past consciousness.
"If apparitions are not impossible," said Lambert, "they must be due
to a faculty of discerning the ideas which represent man in his purest
essence, whose life, imperishable perhaps, escapes our grosser senses,
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: "My dear fellow," I says, "I wish you wouldn't. The fact is, I
don't take to Mr. Randall."
Case laughed, took a lantern from the store, and set out into the
village. He was gone perhaps a quarter of an hour, and he looked
mighty serious when he came back.
"Well," said he, clapping down the lantern on the verandah steps,
"I would never have believed it. I don't know where the impudence
of these Kanakas 'll go next; they seem to have lost all idea of
respect for whites. What we want is a man-of-war - a German, if we
could - they know how to manage Kanakas."
"I AM tabooed, then?" I cried.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: after this, my boy."
Alicia, cool in the summer beat as an Arctic wraith,
white as a Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and
fluttering lace parasol, came round the corner of the
station; and Tom was stripped of his assurance. He
became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on
the homeward drive to the mule alone did he confide
in language the inwardness of his thoughts.
They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a
spendthrift flood of gold upon the fortunate fields of
wheat. The cities were far away. The road lay curl-
The Voice of the City |
