| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: until the town had disappeared and the solitude of the road
recalled to me the emptiness of my heart. Then my tears again
began to flow.
My father had realized that words, even from him, would do
nothing to console me, and he let me weep without saying a word,
only sometimes pressing my hand, as if to remind me that I had a
friend at my side.
At night I slept a little. I dreamed of Marguerite.
I woke with a start, not recalling why I was in the carriage.
Then the truth came back upon me, and I let my head sink on my
breast. I dared not say anything to my father. I was afraid he
Camille |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: the inwrought experience of living may be of value. And that
is a thing which one cannot get in haste, neither can it be
made to order. Patient waiting belongs to it; and rainy days
belong to it; and the best of it sometimes comes in the doing
of tasks that seem not to amount to much. So in the long run,
I suppose, while delay and failure and interruption may keep
a piece of work very small, yet in the end they enter into the
quality of it and bring it a little nearer to the real thing,
which is always more or less of a secret.
But the strangest part of it all is the way in which a
single thought, an idea, will live with a man while he works,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: imagined possible on the eve of the first Sunday in each month? For
six francs during one night we owned every delight of that
inexhaustible shop! and during Mass every response we chanted was
mixed up in our minds with our secret calculations. Which of us all
can recollect ever having had a sou left to spend on the Sunday
following? And which of us but obeyed the instinctive law of social
existence by pitying, helping, and despising those pariahs who, by the
avarice or poverty of their parents, found themselves penniless?
Any one who forms a clear idea of this huge college, with its monastic
buildings in the heart of a little town, and the four plots in which
we were distributed as by a monastic rule, will easily conceive of the
Louis Lambert |
