| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: horrible custom had received the sanction of a public opinion
bequeathed from pre-Vedic times, the Brahmans would have had
no motive for fraudulently reviving it; and this opinion is
virtually established by the fact of the prevalence of widow
sacrifice among Gauls, Scandinavians, Slaves, and other
European Aryans.[176] Though under English rule the rite has
been forcibly suppressed, yet the archaic sentiments which so
long maintained it are not yet extinct. Within the present
year there has appeared in the newspapers a not improbable
story of a beautiful and accomplished Hindu lady who, having
become the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and after living
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was
punishing her for having deceived her husband. That silent,
unrepining, uncomprehended creature, robbed by his mildness of
all personality and will, weak from excessive kindness, had been
suffering in obscurity somewhere on his sofa, and had not
complained. And if he were to complain even in delirium, the
doctors watching by his bedside would learn that diphtheria was
not the only cause of his sufferings. They would ask Korostelev.
He knew all about it, and it was not for nothing that he looked
at his friend's wife with eyes that seemed to say that she was
the real chief criminal and diphtheria was only her accomplice.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: wondering how a girl could preserve her color, living in such a
cellar. A student of lively imagination, going that way to cross to
the Quartier-Latin, would compare this obscure and vegetative life to
that of the ivy that clung to these chill walls, to that of the
peasants born to labor, who are born, toil, and die unknown to the
world they have helped to feed. A house-owner, after studying the
house with the eye of a valuer, would have said, "What will become of
those two women if embroidery should go out of fashion?" Among the men
who, having some appointment at the Hotel de Ville or the Palais de
Justice, were obliged to go through this street at fixed hours, either
on their way to business or on their return home, there may have been
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