| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: that it fell. I'll tell you one of his antiquated, anti-
gallant notions. He said once in my presence, in a
room full of company,--would you believe it?--in a
large circle of ladies, that the best evidence a gentle-
man could give a young lady of his respect and affec-
tion was to endeavour in a friendly manner to rectify
her foibles. I protest I was crimson to the eyes, upon
reflecting that I was known as his sister.
LETITIA
Insupportable creature! tell a lady of her faults! if
he is so grave, I fear I have no chance of captivating
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: to become a sham.
Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too
much the creature of my time for that. But I think that the
proper wisdom is to will what the gods will without, perhaps,
being certain what their will is--or even if they have a will of
their own. And in this matter of life and art it is not the Why
that matters so much to our happiness as the How. As the
Frenchman said, "Il y a toujours la maniere." Very true. Yes.
There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony,
in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love.
The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: breed of cattle, always yielding oxen with extraordinarily long horns,
could be slowly formed by carefully watching which individual bulls and
cows, when matched, produced oxen with the longest horns; and yet no one ox
could ever have propagated its kind. Thus I believe it has been with
social insects: a slight modification of structure, or instinct,
correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of the community,
has been advantageous to the community: consequently the fertile males and
females of the same community flourished, and transmitted to their fertile
offspring a tendency to produce sterile members having the same
modification. And I believe that this process has been repeated, until
that prodigious amount of difference between the fertile and sterile
On the Origin of Species |
