| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: other inquiries.
"No, monsieur."
"What, you pay for all you have?"
"Punctually; otherwise we should lose our credit, and every sort of
respect."
"But at least you have more than one mistress? Ah, you blush, comrade!
Well, manners have changed. All these notions of lawful order,
Kantism, and liberty have spoilt the young men. You have no Guimard
now, no Duthe, no creditors--and you know nothing of heraldry; why, my
dear young friend, you are not fully fledged. The man who does not sow
his wild oats in the spring sows them in the winter. If I have but
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be
myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present
imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that
you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a
new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus,
oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this:
that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be
irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were,
and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to
say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however convenient
as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: If the story once got abroad, I would never hear the last of it.
I could well imagine what the old men down at the drugstore would
do with such a theme.
While grandmother was trying to make me comfortable,
grandfather went to the depot and learned that Wick Cutter
had come home on the night express from the east, and had left
again on the six o'clock train for Denver that morning.
The agent said his face was striped with court-plaster, and
he carried his left hand in a sling. He looked so used up,
that the agent asked him what had happened to him since ten
o'clock the night before; whereat Cutter began to swear at him
My Antonia |
