| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: high-road. In society, my good Raoul, conventions rule love. Either
carry off Madame de Vandenesse, or show yourself a gentleman. As it
is, you are playing the lover in one of your own books."
Nathan listened with his head lowered; he was like a lion caught in a
toil.
"I'll never set foot in this house again," he cried. "That papier-
mache marquise sells her tea too dear. She thinks me amusing! I
understand now why Saint-Just wanted to guillotine this whole class of
people."
"You'll be back here to-morrow."
Blondet was right. Passions are as mean as they are cruel. The next
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did
never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very,
very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as
though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since
Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my
brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have
I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably
old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human
eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze
upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the
magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into
the shadowland of pre-existence.
- Charles Lamb: Witches and
Other Night-Fears
I.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts
takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond
Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
The
ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer
and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees
The Dunwich Horror |
