| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: confided to him any of his military projects. He said he supposed the
proconsul was the friend of Caligula, who often visited Agrippa; and
expressed a surmise that he himself might be exiled, or that perhaps
his throat would be cut.
Herodias, who now treated him with a kind of disdainful indulgence,
tried to reassure him. At last she took from a small casket a curious
medallion, ornamented with a profile of Tiberius. The sight of it, she
said, as she gave it to Antipas, would make the lictors turn pale and
silence all accusing voices.
Antipas, filled with gratitude, asked her how the medallion had come
into her possession.
Herodias |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: strongly with the penury of the Republic, that the wealth of the globe
seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms of Paris. Intoxication
seemed to have turned the brains of this Empire of a day. All the
military, not excepting their chief, reveled like parvenus in the
treasure conquered for them by a million men with worsted epaulettes,
whose demands were satisfied by a few yards of red ribbon.
At this time most women affected that lightness of conduct and
facility of morals which distinguished the reign of Louis XV. Whether
it were in imitation of the tone of the fallen monarchy, or because
certain members of the Imperial family had set the example--as certain
malcontents of the Faubourg Saint-Germain chose to say--it is certain
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: with a different eye. As to the point in question he was
compelled to accept her word; in the circumstances he could
not have acted otherwise while ordinary notions prevailed.
But how came they to prevail?
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual
which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes involving years
of thought and labour, of foregoing a man's one opportunity of showing
himself superior to the lower animals, and of contributing his units
of work to the general progress of his generation, because of a momentary
surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it
of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness.
Jude the Obscure |
