| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: break your marriage--your children would be illegitimate!"
Madame de Cintre was calmly happy before the world,
and Newman had the felicity of fancying that before him,
when the world was absent, she was almost agitatedly happy.
She said very tender things. "I take no pleasure in you.
You never give me a chance to scold you, to correct you.
I bargained for that, I expected to enjoy it. But you
won't do anything dreadful; you are dismally inoffensive.
It is very stupid; there is no excitement for me; I might
as well be marrying some one else."
"I am afraid it's the worst I can do," Newman would say in answer
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: wrong: the burrow is excavated, from start to finish, by her
unaided labour.
Then where are the digging-implements? We think of the legs, of
the claws. We think of them, but reflection tells us that tools
such as these would not do: they are too long and too difficult to
wield in a confined space. What is required is the miner's short-
handled pick, wherewith to drive hard, to insert, to lever and to
extract; what is required is the sharp point that enters the earth
and crumbles it into fragments. There remain the Lycosa's fangs,
delicate weapons which we at first hesitate to associate with such
work, so illogical does it seem to dig a pit with surgeon's
The Life of the Spider |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: 'I ask you yourself. When a man has been so foolish as to live with a
woman of my sort; for, after all, I was an opera dancer--yes, I ought
always to remember that, if other people are to forget it--well, under
those circumstances, a clever man seeking to raise his wife in public
opinion would do his best to impose her upon the world as a remarkable
woman, to justify the step he had taken by acknowledging that in some
ways she was something more than ordinary women. The best way of
compelling respect from others is to pay respect to her at home, and
to leave her absolute mistress of the house. Well, and yet it is
enough to awaken one's vanity to see how frightened he is of seeming
to listen to me. I must be in the right ten times over if he concedes
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