| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: a brute who passed him on the stairway without speaking. He wrote out
his bills for rent himself, and sent them on the morning of the day
they fell due. The debtor who was behindhand in his payment received a
legal notice to quit at an appointed time. Then followed seizures,
law-suits, costs, and the whole judicial array set in motion with the
rapidity of what the head's-man calls the "mechanism." Molineux
granted neither grace nor time; his heart was a callus in the
direction of a lease.
"I will lend you the money if you want it," he would say to a man he
thought solvent, "but pay my rent; all delays carry with them a loss
of interest for which the law does not indemnify us."
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Koran: And those who misbelieved say, 'Our Lord, show us those who have led
us astray amongst the ginns and mankind; we will place them beneath
'our feet, and they shall both be amongst those who are put down!'
Verily, those who say, 'Our Lord is God,' and then go straight, the
angels descend upon them-'fear not and be not grieved, but receive the
glad tidings of Paradise which ye were promised; we are your patrons
in the life of this world and in the next, and ye shall have therein
what your souls desire, and ye shall have therein what ye call for,-an
entertainment from the forgiving, the merciful!'
And who speaks better than he who calls to God and does right, and
says, 'Verily, I am of those resigned?'
The Koran |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: magnanimity. Men do not love those who remind them of their sins
unless they have a mind to repent--and the mulatto child's face
is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to
the child. What is still worse, perhaps, such a child is a
constant offense to the wife. She hates its very presence, and
when a slaveholding woman hates, she wants not means to give that
hate telling effect. Women--white women, I mean--are IDOLS at
the south, not WIVES, for the slave women are preferred in many
instances; and if these _idols_ but nod, or lift a finger, woe to
the poor victim: kicks, cuffs and stripes are sure to follow.
Masters are frequently compelled to sell this class of their
My Bondage and My Freedom |
