| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: things where we believe ourselves superior.
"Still, monsieur, though I often make a jest of comparing China with
the present condition of European states, I am not a Chinaman, I am a
French gentleman. If you entertain any doubts as to the financial side
of this undertaking, I can prove to you that at this moment we have
two thousand five hundred subscribers to this work, which is literary,
iconographical, statistical, and religious; its importance has been
generally appreciated; our subscribers belong to every nation in
Europe, we have but twelve hundred in France. Our book will cost about
three hundred francs, and the Comte de Nouvion will derive from it
from six to seven thousand francs a year, for his comfort was the real
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas: Raoul,' others may be put so significant and so incendiary
as to cause Madame de Saint-Remy to burst out into fire and
flames! Hein! is not that true now? -- say."
And Montalais redoubled her laughter and noisy provocations.
The fair girl at length became quite angry; she tore the
sheet of paper on which, in fact, the words "Monsieur Raoul"
were written in good characters, and crushing the paper in
her trembling hands, she threw it out of the window.
"There! there!" said Mademoiselle de Montalais; "there is
our little lamb, our gentle dove, angry! Don't be afraid,
Louise -- Madame de Saint-Remy will not come; and if she
Ten Years Later |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally
repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all
eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and
would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to
believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he
was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous
occurrence in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this
favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists. He tried his hand
occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as
people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and
swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see
|
