| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: admitted into the class of Equilaterals. He is then immediately
taken from his proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some
childless Equilateral, who is bound by oath never to permit the child
henceforth to enter his former home or so much as to look upon
his relations again, for fear lest the freshly developed organism may,
by force of unconscious imitation, fall back again into
his hereditary level.
The occasional emergence of an Equilateral from the ranks
of his serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by
the poor serfs themselves, as a gleam of light and hope shed upon
the monotonous squalor of their existence, but also by the Aristocracy
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Adam Bede by George Eliot: seemed to have lost all consciousness that he was using a figure
of speech. "If I'd known Vixen was a woman, I'd never have held
the boys from drowning her; but when I'd got her into my hand, I
was forced to take to her. And now you see what she's brought me
to--the sly, hypocritical wench"--Bartle spoke these last words in
a rasping tone of reproach, and looked at Vixen, who poked down
her head and turned up her eyes towards him with a keen sense of
opprobrium--"and contrived to be brought to bed on a Sunday at
church-time. I've wished again and again I'd been a bloody minded
man, that I could have strangled the mother and the brats with one
cord."
Adam Bede |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: him, and could not refrain each time from saying, 'A devil, a perfect
devil!' But I must introduce you as speedily as possible to my father,
the chief character of this story.
"My father was a remarkable man in many respects. He was an artist of
rare ability, a self-taught artist, without teachers or schools,
principles and rules, carried away only by the thirst for perfection,
and treading a path indicated by his own instincts, for reasons
unknown, perchance, even to himself. Through some lofty and secret
instinct he perceived the presence of a soul in every object. And this
secret instinct and personal conviction turned his brush to Christian
subjects, grand and lofty to the last degree. His was a strong
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
