| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: the edge of the bank to see the little stream that made the noise;
it flowed along perfectly clear over the sand and gravel,
cut off from the muddy main current by a long sandbar.
Down there, on the lower shelf of the bank, I saw Antonia,
seated alone under the pagoda-like elders. She looked up when
she heard me, and smiled, but I saw that she had been crying.
I slid down into the soft sand beside her and asked her what
was the matter.
`It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell,' she said softly.
`We have this flower very much at home, in the old country.
It always grew in our yard and my papa had a green bench and a
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: "Yes. My head felt as if it were being screwed up in a vise, but
now it is set free again. Did you see my girls? They will be here
directly; as soon as they know that I am ill they will hurry here
at once; they used to take such care of me in the Rue de la
Jussienne! Great Heavens! if only my room was fit for them to
come into! There has been a young man here, who has burned up all
my bark fuel."
"I can hear Christophe coming upstairs," Eugene answered. "He is
bringing up some firewood that that young man has sent you."
"Good, but how am I to pay for the wood. I have not a penny left,
dear boy. I have given everything, everything. I am a pauper now.
Father Goriot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: marionnettes to a peal of jeering laughter.
I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty
well acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less
artistic; and have always found them singularly pleasing. Any
stroller must be dear to the right-thinking heart; if it were only
as a living protest against offices and the mercantile spirit, and
as something to remind us that life is not by necessity the kind of
thing we generally make it. Even a German band, if you see it
leaving town in the early morning for a campaign in country places,
among trees and meadows, has a romantic flavour for the
imagination. There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but his heart
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