| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: that the collected ideas to which we give the name of feelings may
very possibly be the material outcome of some fluid which is generated
in all men, more or less abundantly, according to the way in which
their organs absorb, from the medium in which they live, the
elementary atoms that produce it. We went crazy over catalepsy; and
with the eagerness that boys throw into every pursuit, we endeavored
to endure pain by thinking of something else. We exhausted ourselves
by making experiments not unlike those of the epileptic fanatics of
the last century, a religious mania which will some day be of service
to the science of humanity. I would stand on Lambert's chest,
remaining there for several minutes without giving him the slightest
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.
XXVII
SUSY and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided
from each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with
tattered school-books.
In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children
from their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any
moment Geordie's imperious cries might summon his slave up to
the nursery. In the scant time allotted them, the two sat, and
visibly wondered what to say.
Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: right round expressed his philosophy.
Meantime the Assistant Commissioner was already giving his order to
a waiter in a little Italian restaurant round the corner - one of
those traps for the hungry, long and narrow, baited with a
perspective of mirrors and white napery; without air, but with an
atmosphere of their own - an atmosphere of fraudulent cookery
mocking an abject mankind in the most pressing of its miserable
necessities. In this immoral atmosphere the Assistant
Commissioner, reflecting upon his enterprise, seemed to lose some
more of his identity. He had a sense of loneliness, of evil
freedom. It was rather pleasant. When, after paying for his short
The Secret Agent |
