| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: "Bruno," the little fellow answered, very readily. "Why didn't oo say
'please' before?"
"That's something like what we used to be taught in the nursery,"
I thought to myself, looking back through the long years (about a hundred
of them, since you ask the question), to the time when I was a little
child. And here an idea came into my head, and I asked him "Aren't you
one of the Fairies that teach children to be good?"
"Well, we have to do that sometimes," said Bruno, "and a dreadful
bother it is." As he said this, he savagely tore a heartsease in two,
and trampled on the pieces.
"What are you doing there, Bruno?" I said.
Sylvie and Bruno |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: of the rich who feels anything like as keenly as I
do either the injustice, the cruelty, and the horror
of their oppression of and contempt for the poor;
or the grinding humiliation and misery which
befall the great majority of the workers, the real
producers of all that makes life possible. I have
felt this for a long time, and as the years have
passed by the feeling has grown and grown, until
recently it reached its climax. Although I feel all
this so vividly, I still live on amid the depravity
and sins of rich society; and I cannot leave it,
The Forged Coupon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: the cleverest /roue/ could not have made the impression that M. de
Nueil made with that cry from the heart. That verdict wrung from a
young man's candor gave her back innocence in her own eyes, condemned
the world, laid the blame upon the lover who had left her, and
justified her subsequent solitary drooping life. The world's
absolution, the heartfelt sympathy, the social esteem so longed for,
and so harshly refused, nay, all her secret desires were given her to
the full in that exclamation, made fairer yet by the heart's sweetest
flatteries and the admiration that women always relish eagerly. He
understood her, understood all, and he had given her, as if it were
the most natural thing in the world, the opportunity of rising higher
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