| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: clamped down by a taboo of silence, imposed by the horrible
superstition of sex-prudery! George went out from the doctor's
office trembling with excitement over this situation. Oh, why
had not some one warned him in time? Why didn't the doctors and
the teachers lift up their voices and tell young men about these
frightful dangers? He wanted to go out in the highways and
preach it himself--except that he dared not, because he could not
explain to the world his own sudden interest in this forbidden
topic.
These was only one person he dared to talk to: that was his
mother--to whom he ought to have talked many, many years before.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: all the same thing in the end, and we were all drawing near by
different sides to the same kind and undiscriminating Friend and
Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits, would be the only gospel
worthy of the name. But different men think differently; and this
revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest with all the
terrors of the law. He launched into harrowing details of hell.
The damned, he said - on the authority of a little book which he
had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to
conviction, he had fully intended to bring along with him in his
pocket - were to occupy the same attitude through all eternity in
the midst of dismal tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: seemed to be at this moment. He rose to go and open the closet door.
Madame de Merret took his hand, stopped him, looked at him sadly, and
said in a voice of strange emotion, 'Remember, if you should find no
one there, everything must be at an end between you and me.'
"The extraordinary dignity of his wife's attitude filled him with deep
esteem for her, and inspired him with one of those resolves which need
only a grander stage to become immortal.
" 'No, Josephine,' he said, 'I will not open it. In either event we
should be parted for ever. Listen; I know all the purity of your soul,
I know you lead a saintly life, and would not commit a deadly sin to
save your life.'--At these words Madame de Merret looked at her
La Grande Breteche |
