| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: But when the whole class was here assembled, childlike heads were seen
among this bevy of young girls, ravishingly pure and virgin, faces
with lips half-opened, through which shone spotless teeth, and on
which a virgin smile was flickering. The studio then resembled not a
studio, but a group of angels seated on a cloud in ether.
By mid-day, on this occasion, Servin had not appeared. For some days
past he had spent most of his time in a studio which he kept
elsewhere, where he was giving the last touches to a picture for the
Exposition. All of a sudden Mademoiselle Amelie Thirion, the leader of
the aristocrats, began to speak in a low voice, and very earnestly, to
her neighbor. A great silence fell on the group of patricians, and the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: garnished with flowers, each fish holding a big pansy in its mouth,
and as the maid set them down before me she wished me "a good
appetite," with the hearty old-fashioned Tyrolese courtesy which
still survives in these remote valleys. It is pleasant to travel
in a land where the manners are plain and good. If you meet a
peasant on the road he says, "God greet you!" if you give a child a
couple of kreuzers he folds his hands and says, "God reward you!"
and the maid who lights you to bed says, "Goodnight, I hope you
will sleep well!"
Two hours more of walking brought us through Ausser-gschloss and
Inner-gschloss, two groups of herdsmen's huts, tenanted only in
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to
weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple
pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is
certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.
If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit
whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic
affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared
his country, America would have been discovered more gradually,
and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of
my tale, and your looks remind me to proceed. My father made no
Frankenstein |
