| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard: anything that I had ever smelt before. It seemed to penetrate all
through me, and that accursed stone in my throat grew as large as an
apple and felt as though someone were poking it upwards with a stick.
Next he threw the white pebble into the right-hand fire, that which was
opposite to me, saying:
"Enter, Macumazahn, and look," and the black pebble he threw into the
left-hand fire saying: "Enter, Son of Matiwane, and look. Then come
back both of you and make report to me, your master."
Now it is a fact that as he said these words I experienced a sensation
as though a stone had come out of my throat; so readily do our nerves
deceive us that I even thought it grated against my teeth as I opened my
Child of Storm |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: really came to hate everybody he had ever come in con-
tact with. A temper naturally irritable and an amazing
sensitiveness to the claims of his own personality had
ended by making of life for him a sort of inferno--a
place where his lost soul had been given up to the tor-
ment of savage brooding.
But he had never hated anyone so much as that old
man who had turned up one evening to save him from
an utter disaster,--from the conspiracy of the wretched
sailors. He seemed to have fallen on board from the
sky. His footsteps echoed on the empty steamer, and
End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: he of the Chaussee d'Antin takes his ease, reads the money-articles in
the newspapers, and has a business of his own in the faubourg
Montmartre. The portress in the quarter of prostitution was formerly a
prostitute; in the Marais, she has morals, is cross-grained, and full
of crotchets.
On seeing Monsieur Jules this particular portress, holding her
knitting in one hand, took a knife and stirred the half-extinguished
peat in her foot-warmer; then she said:--
"You want Madame Etienne; do you mean Madame Etienne Gruget?"
"Yes," said Jules, assuming a vexed air.
"Who makes trimmings?"
Ferragus |
