| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and
shrunk--for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was
childless and a widower--he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not
disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how
things stood between them. Begun long years ago, their friendship had
petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before
her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying
different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some
tendency, when they met, to repeat.
Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turning
to walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr Bankes was alive to things
To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: It was obviously the memory of this promise that made him say
to his companion a couple of days later that he rather wondered
he should be so fond of that girl.
"In the first place, how do you know how fond I am of her?"
asked Lord Lambeth. "And, in the second place, why shouldn't
I be fond of her?"
"I shouldn't think she would be in your line."
"What do you call my 'line'? You don't set her down as 'fast'?"
"Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there is no such thing
as the 'fast girl' in America; that it's an English invention,
and that the term has no meaning here."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double
organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most
likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
