| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: then. Give me something to drink! There is a fire in my bowels.
Press something against my forehead! If my daughters would lay
their hands there, I think I should get better. . . . MON DIEU!
who will recover their money for them when I am gone? . . . I
will manufacture vermicelli out in Odessa; I will go to Odessa
for their sakes."
"Here is something to drink," said Eugene, supporting the dying
man on his left arm, while he held a cup of tisane to Goriot's
lips.
"How you must love your own father and mother!" said the old man,
and grasped the student's hand in both of his. It was a feeble,
Father Goriot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: ruin; but this house, still standing, though being slowly destroyed by
an avenging hand, contained a secret, an unrevealed thought. At the
very least, it testified to a caprice. More than once in the evening I
boarded the hedge, run wild, which surrounded the enclosure. I braved
scratches, I got into this ownerless garden, this plot which was no
longer public or private; I lingered there for hours gazing at the
disorder. I would not, as the price of the story to which this strange
scene no doubt was due, have asked a single question of any gossiping
native. On that spot I wove delightful romances, and abandoned myself
to little debauches of melancholy which enchanted me. If I had known
the reason--perhaps quite commonplace--of this neglect, I should have
La Grande Breteche |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: come to you; for I am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the
cause of this and of the other mysteries of love.' 'Marvel not,' she said,
'if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times
acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal
nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal:
and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always
leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the
life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a
man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between
youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity,
he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation--hair, flesh,
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