| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to her chamber greatly puzzled,
and on the staircase had dropped this exclamation: "This is
too much!"--and this interrogation: "But where is it that he goes?"
She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less illicit,
a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would
not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair.
Tasting a mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal;
sainted souls do not detest this. There is some curiosity about
scandal in the secret compartments of bigotry.
So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.
In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: of a cart or carriage spring up suddenly after hours of stillness,
and pass, for some minutes, within the range of my hearing as I lay
abed. There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black
hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess their
business. But here the romance was double: first, this glad
passenger, lit internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music
through the night; and then I, on the other hand, buckled into my
sack, and smoking alone in the pine-woods between four and five
thousand feet towards the stars.
When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had
disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: moral, social and intellectual standards of population?
We sent this questionnaire not only to those who we thought might
agree with us, but we sent it also to our known opponents.
When I arrived at the Town Hall the entrance was guarded by policemen.
They told me there would be no meeting. Before my arrival r
executives had been greeted by Monsignor Dineen, secretary of
Archbishop Hayes, of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, who informed them
that the meeting would be prohibited on the ground that it was
contrary to public morals. The police had closed the doors. When
they opened them to permit the exit of the large audience which had
gathered, Mr. Cox and I entered. I attempted to exercise my
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