| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: world, the three great spaces of sea and land and sky, were
incarnadined with the glory of it. The ocean floor was a blinding
red radiance, the hills were amethyst, the sky one gigantic opal,
and they two seemed poised in the midst of all the chaotic glory
of a primitive world. It was New Year's Day; the earth was new,
the year was new, and their love was new and strong. Everything
was before them. There was no longer any past, no longer any
present. Regrets and memories had no place in their new world.
It was Hope, Hope, Hope, that sang to them and called to them and
smote into life the new keen blood of them.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: bright. The hairy-chested recruiting officer stood just beside
him, and suffered by contrast. There was a bedlam of good-byes,
and last messages, and good-natured badinage, but Eddie's mother's
eyes never left his face until the train disappeared around the
curve in the track.
Well, they got a new boy at Kunz's--a sandy-haired youth, with
pimples, and no knack at mixing, and we got out of the habit of
dropping in there, although those fall months were unusually warm.
It wasn't long before we began to get postcards--pictures of
the naval training station, and the gymnasium, and of model camps
and of drills, and of Eddie in his uniform. His mother insisted on
Buttered Side Down |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: crude and blind, reflecting themselves in his own nature,
huge, strong, brutal in its simplicity. And this, though he
only saw the mountains at night. They appeared far different
then than in the daytime. At twelve o'clock he came out of
the mine and lunched on the contents of his dinner-pail,
sitting upon the embankment of the track, eating with both
hands, and looking around him with a steady ox-like gaze.
The mountains rose sheer from every side, heaving their
gigantic crests far up into the night, the black peaks
crowding together, and looking now less like beasts than
like a company of cowled giants. In the daytime they
McTeague |
