| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: reveals to one's sight a quantity of outre peculiarities, they are, as
a class, exceedingly difficult to portray, and one needs to strain
one's faculties to the utmost before it becomes possible to pick out
their variously subtle, their almost invisible, features. In short,
one needs, before doing this, to carry out a prolonged probing with
the aid of an insight sharpened in the acute school of research.
Only God can say what Manilov's real character was. A class of men
exists whom the proverb has described as "men unto themselves, neither
this nor that--neither Bogdan of the city nor Selifan of the village."
And to that class we had better assign also Manilov. Outwardly he was
presentable enough, for his features were not wanting in amiability,
Dead Souls |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: the whole of the dialogue excepting those first words.
Such a meeting was of a kind to strike Madame de Stael very greatly;
on her return home she said but little about it, notwithstanding an
effusiveness which in her became mere loquacity; but it evidently
occupied her thoughts.
The only person now living who preserves any recollection of the
incident, and whom I catechised to be informed of what few words
Madame de Stael had let drop, could with difficulty recall these words
spoken by the Baroness as describing Lambert, "He is a real seer."
Louis failed to justify in the eyes of the world the high hopes he had
inspired in his protectress. The transient favor she showed him was
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: to her aid, however, Russia demanded a similar cession of Port
Arthur, Talienwan and the surrounding territory which she had
refused to allow Japan to retain two years before. Not to be
outdone by the others, France demanded and received a similar
strip of territory at Kuang-chou-wan; and England found that
Wei-hai-wei would be indispensable as a kennel from which she
could guard the Russian bear on the opposite shore, but why she
should have found it necessary also to demand from China four
hundred miles of land and water around Hongkong was no doubt
difficult for Kuang Hsu to understand.
When the Empress Dowager turned over the reins of government to
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