| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: registers are not kept as they are in France, and where we have no
consul. Uncertain whether she might not be forced to give up her
fortune, she has lived with the utmost prudence. As for me, I wish to
acquire property which shall be MINE, so as to provide for my wife in
case she is forced to lose hers."
"But why didn't you tell me all this? My dear nephew, you might have
known that I love you enough to pay all your good debts, the debts of
a gentleman. I'll play the traditional uncle now, and revenge myself!"
"Ah! uncle, I know your vengeance! but let me get rich by my own
industry. If you want to do me a real service, make me an allowance of
two or three thousand francs a year, till I see my way to an
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Koran: discourse; for it may be that Satan may make thee forget; but sit not,
after thou hast remembered, with the unjust people.
Those who fear are not bound to take account of them at all, but
mind!- haply they may fear.
Leave those who have taken their religion for a play and a sport,
whom this world's life hath deceived, and remind them thereby that a
soul shall be given up for what it has earned; nor has it, beside God,
patron or intercessor; and though it should compensate with the
fullest compensation, it would not be accepted. Those who are given up
for what they have gained, for them is a drink of boiling water, and
grievous woe for that they have misbelieved.
The Koran |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: before he was to pronounce his bridegroom's vow. So here, at Mrs.
Trevise's dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a vision of
the unhappy boy's plight; he was sticking to a task which he loathed that
he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as he saw it,
was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his kind, gave
him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything except the
cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign--from aged Daddy Ben,
at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises and conclusions,
that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of fidelity and
affection from the heart of a black man, took on a strange pathos in its
isolation amid the general harshness of his white superiors. Over this it
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