| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: In fact we reached the boat's side and were all aboard
before the watch upon the battleship, aroused by the shots,
detected us. Then an alarm gun bellowed from a ship's
bow, its deep boom reverberating in deafening tones beneath
the rocky dome of Omean.
Instantly the sleeping thousands were awake. The decks of
a thousand monster craft teemed with fighting-men, for an
alarm on Omean was a thing of rare occurrence.
We cast away before the sound of the first gun had died,
and another second saw us rising swiftly from the surface
of the sea. I lay at full length along the deck with the levers
The Gods of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: Reading."
"Ah, my dear, ever since this Mr. ---- turned up, I really
don't know which of Lyoff Nikolaievich's writings are by Lyoff
Nikolaievich and which are by Mr. ----!" murmured our old friend,
the pure-hearted and far from malicious Márya
Alexandróvna Schmidt.
This sort of intrusion into my father's work as an author
bore, in the "friend's" language, the modest title of "corrections
beforehand," and there is no doubt that Márya
Alexandróvna was right, for no one will ever know where what
my father wrote ends and where his concessions to Mr. ----'s
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: that way. To float in ether after floating on the wave!--ah! who would
not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence
comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads
without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more
imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like
fortune, by the hair when it comes.
Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was
galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I
looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild
imagination was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a
woman issuing refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur
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