| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: Of beasts, it is confessed, the ape
Comes nearest us in human shape;
Like man, he imitates each fashion,
And malice is his ruling passion:
But, both in malice and grimaces,
A courtier any ape surpasses.
Behold him humbly cringing wait
Upon the minister of state;
View him, soon after, to inferiors
Aping the conduct of superiors:
He promises, with equal air,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: who had brought him up at the cost of the severest privations.
Mademoiselle Schinner, the daughter of an Alsatian farmer, had
never been married. Her tender soul had been cruelly crushed,
long ago, by a rich man, who did not pride himself on any great
delicacy in his love affairs. The day when, as a young girl, in
all the radiance of her beauty and all the triumph of her life,
she suffered, at the cost of her heart and her sweet illusions,
the disenchantment which falls on us so slowly and yet so
quickly--for we try to postpone as long as possible our belief in
evil, and it seems to come too soon--that day was a whole age of
reflection, and it was also a day of religious thought and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: Fields, and raged most violently in Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, and
Shoreditch parishes; but there was not ten people a week that died of
it in all that part of Stepney parish which takes in Limehouse, Ratdiff
Highway, and which are now the parishes of Shadwell and Wapping,
even to St Katherine's by the Tower, till after the whole month of
August was expired. But they paid for it afterwards, as I shall observe
by-and-by.
This, I say, made the people of Redriff and Wapping, Ratcliff and
Limehouse, so secure, and flatter themselves so much with the
plague's going off without reaching them, that they took no care either
to fly into the country or shut themselves up. Nay, so far were they
A Journal of the Plague Year |
