| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: meaning; the coquette quivered when she felt her friend stroke her
head; her eyes flashed like lightning--then she shut them tightly.
"She has a soul," he said, looking at the stillness of this queen of
the sands, golden like them, white like them, solitary and burning
like them.
"Well," she said, "I have read your plea in favor of beasts; but how
did two so well adapted to understand each other end?"
"Ah, well! you see, they ended as all great passions do end--by a
misunderstanding. For some reason ONE suspects the other of treason;
they don't come to an explanation through pride, and quarrel and part
from sheer obstinacy."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: with patent leather shoes on is my best friend. Why did you go and get
him invested in this marriage business?"
"Why, he was the only chance there was," answers Miss Rebosa.
"Nay," says I, giving a sickening look of admiration at her complexion
and style of features; "with your beauty you might pick any kind of a
man. Listen, Rebosa. Old Mack ain't the man you want. He was twenty-
two when you was /nee/ Reed, as the papers say. This bursting into
bloom won't last with him. He's all ventilated with oldness and
rectitude and decay. Old Mack's down with a case of Indian summer. He
overlooked his bet when he was young; and now he's suing Nature for
the interest on the promissory note he took from Cupid instead of the
Heart of the West |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: whereas in other States members of the same government regard one of their
colleagues as a friend and another as an enemy, in our State no man is a
stranger to another; for every citizen is connected with every other by
ties of blood, and these names and this way of speaking will have a
corresponding reality--brother, father, sister, mother, repeated from
infancy in the ears of children, will not be mere words. Then again the
citizens will have all things in common, in having common property they
will have common pleasures and pains.
Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one mind; or
lawsuits about property when men have nothing but their bodies which they
call their own; or suits about violence when every one is bound to defend
The Republic |
