| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: stupidity, why not concern ourselves with the sorrows of stupidity as
well as with the sorrows of genius? The former is a social element
infinitely more abundant than the latter.
So, then, Mademoiselle Cormon was guilty in the eyes of the world of
the divine ignorance of virgins. She was no observer, and her behavior
with her suitors proved it. At this very moment, a young girl of
sixteen, who had never opened a novel, would have read a hundred
chapters of a love story in the eyes of Athanase Granson, where
Mademoiselle Cormon saw absolutely nothing. Shy herself, she never
suspected shyness in others; she did not recognize in the quavering
tones of his speech the force of a sentiment he could not utter.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: To crowd the court with their relations:
His country was his dearest mother,
And every virtuous man his brother:
Through modesty or awkward shame
(For which he owns himself to blame),
He found the wisest men he could,
Without respect to friends or blood;
Nor never acts on private views,
When he hath liberty to choose.
The sharper swore he hated play,
Except to pass an hour away:
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: themselves that some day they, too, will swing axes and
fell trees. And so with me. The life that was in me
was constituted to do what my father did, and it
whispered to me secretly and ambitiously of aerial
paths and forest flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry.
I remember the out-thrust of his protruding underlip as
he glared down at the wild pigs. He snarled something
like a dog, and I remember that his eye-teeth were
large, like fangs, and that they impressed me
tremendously.
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