| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: When, in a dream, it occurred to the youth
that his rifle was an impotent stick, he lost sense
of everything but his hate, his desire to smash
into pulp the glittering smile of victory which he
could feel upon the faces of his enemies.
The blue smoke-swallowed line curled and
writhed like a snake stepped upon. It swung its
ends to and fro in an agony of fear and rage.
The youth was not conscious that he was erect
upon his feet. He did not know the direction of
the ground. Indeed, once he even lost the habit
The Red Badge of Courage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: then said, casually--as if returning to a minor subject:
"You were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I believe?"
He was. To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it
something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it
were, mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should
not be suspected of "countenancing any doings of that sort."
Seven-and-thirty virtuous years at sea, of which over twenty
of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora,
seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation.
"And you know," he went on, groping shame-facedly amongst his feelings,
"I did not engage that young fellow. His people had some
The Secret Sharer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch.
The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a
winter's morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer going to early work,
stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained--
superficially at least--by a visible wound to his head; such a wound
as might have been produced--and as, on the final evidence, HAD been--
by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public house,
on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at the bottom of
which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and in liquor,
accounted for much--practically, in the end and after the inquest and
boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been matters in his life--
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