| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: kind hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill
name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations;
the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.
"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful
passage I remember to have read in any modern author, (1) "two
to speak truth - one to speak and another to hear." He must
be very little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth,
who does not recognise the fact. A grain of anger or a grain
of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes
the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who
have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: at one time the Sun is represented as the conqueror of hydras
and dragons who hide away from men the golden treasures of
light and warmth, and at another time he is represented as a
weary voyager traversing the sky-sea amid many perils, with
the steadfast purpose of returning to his western home and his
twilight bride; hence the different conceptions of Herakles,
Bellerophon, and Odysseus. Now he is represented as the son of
the Dawn, and again, with equal propriety, as the son of the
Night, and the fickle lover of the Dawn; hence we have, on the
one hand, stories of a virgin mother who dies in giving birth
to a hero, and, on the other hand, stories of a beautiful
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: might say a word of hope and thus mislead her.
CHAPTER X
THE FAMILY OF PORTENDUERE
Madame de Portenduere was at this moment alone with the abbe in her
frigid little salon on the ground floor, having finished the recital
of her troubles to the good priest, her only friend. She held in her
hand some letters which he had just returned to her after reading
them; these letters had brought her troubles to a climax. Seated on
her sofa beside a square table covered with the remains of a dessert,
the old lady was looking at the abbe, who sat on the other side of the
table, doubled up in his armchair and stroking his chin with the
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