| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: seen piecemeal or unfinished.
If the old adage is true that says a woman may be judged of from her
front door, her rooms must express her mind with even greater
fidelity. Madame de Granville had perhaps stamped the various things
she had ordered with the seal of her own character; the young lawyer
was certainly startled by the cold, arid solemnity that reigned in
these rooms; he found nothing to charm his taste; everything was
discordant, nothing gratified the eye. The rigid mannerism that
prevailed in the sitting-room at Bayeux had invaded his home; the
broad panels were hollowed in circles, and decorated with those
arabesques of which the long, monotonous mouldings are in such bad
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: suggests and arranges a world of particulars. The power of reflection is
not feebler than the faculty of sense, but of a higher and more
comprehensive nature. It not only receives the universals of sense, but
gives them a new content by comparing and combining them with one another.
It withdraws from the seen that it may dwell in the unseen. The sense only
presents us with a flat and impenetrable surface: the mind takes the world
to pieces and puts it together on a new pattern. The universals which are
detached from sense are reconstructed in science. They and not the mere
impressions of sense are the truth of the world in which we live; and (as
an argument to those who will only believe 'what they can hold in their
hands') we may further observe that they are the source of our power over
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: present time I have been frightened of nothing. I open my
cupboards, and look under my bed; I listen--I listen--to what?
How strange it is that a simple feeling of discomfort, of impeded
or heightened circulation, perhaps the irritation of a nervous
center, a slight congestion, a small disturbance in the imperfect
and delicate functions of our living machinery, can turn the most
light-hearted of men into a melancholy one, and make a coward of
the bravest? Then, I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man
might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread,
and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body
shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment
|
