| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: Academy of Sciences; a melancholy collapse caused by blunders such
as none of the ancient engineers--the man who cut the canal at
Briare in Henri IV.'s time, or the monk who built the Pont Royal--
would have made; but our administration consoled its engineer for
his blunder by making him a member of the Council-general.
Are the technical schools vast manufactories of incapables? That
subject requires careful investigation. If I am right they need
reforming, at any rate in their method of proceeding,--for I am
not, of course, doubting the utility of such schools. Only, when
we look back into the past we see that France in former days never
wanted for the great talents necessary to the State; but now she
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely
a few dwarf plants. Why, then, and the case is not peculiar
to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on
my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener
and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind,
produced an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these
feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given
to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless,
for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown: they
bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, for ages,
and there appears no limit to their duration through future
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs: he regret the safe respectability of the plumber's appren-
tice? Or, if he had not been a plumber's apprentice did
he yearn to once again assume the unharried peace of
whatever legitimate calling had been his before he bent
his steps upon the broad boulevard of sin? We think he
did.
And then he saw through the chinks and apertures
in the half ruined wall of what had once been a hay
barn the rosy flare of a genial light which appeared to
announce in all but human terms that man, red blooded
and hospitable, forgathered within. No growling dogs,
The Oakdale Affair |
