| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: from an object too mean to merit observation. I could not unlove
him, because I felt sure he would soon marry this very lady--because
I read daily in her a proud security in his intentions respecting
her--because I witnessed hourly in him a style of courtship which,
if careless and choosing rather to be sought than to seek, was yet,
in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its very pride,
irresistible.
There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances,
though much to create despair. Much too, you will think, reader, to
engender jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be
jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram's. But I was not jealous: or
Jane Eyre |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: he only shook his head and said if we only knowed what it
was to carry around a murderer's load in your heart we
wouldn't talk that way. Tom and all of us kept telling
him it WASN'T murder, but just accidental killing!
but it never made any difference--it was murder, and he
wouldn't have it any other way. He actu'ly begun to come
out plain and square towards trial time and acknowledge
that he TRIED to kill the man. Why, that was awful,
you know. It made things seem fifty times as dreadful,
and there warn't no more comfort for Aunt Sally and Benny.
But he promised he wouldn't say a word about his murder
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: abstract from these'--what then? After seeming to hover for a time on the
verge of a great truth, we have gained only a truism.
Let us ask the question in another form. What is that which constitutes
happiness, over and above the several ingredients of health, wealth,
pleasure, virtue, knowledge, which are included under it? Perhaps we
answer, 'The subjective feeling of them.' But this is very far from being
coextensive with right. Or we may reply that happiness is the whole of
which the above-mentioned are the parts. Still the question recurs, 'In
what does the whole differ from all the parts?' And if we are unable to
distinguish them, happiness will be the mere aggregate of the goods of
life.
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