| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: English in a strange tongue.
His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and
perhaps handsome.
Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and
voice. She looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the
chafing detail of housework--and then a grave somewhere up the
hill among the blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a
small and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far
from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.
We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: occupied only the shop and the /entresol/, and advised him to remove
their own appartement to the first floor. A fortunate event induced
Constance to shut her eyes to the follies which Birotteau committed
for her sake in fitting up the new appartement. The perfumer had just
been elected judge in the commercial courts: his integrity, his well-
known sense of honor, and the respect he enjoyed, earned for him this
dignity, which ranked him henceforth among the leading merchants of
Paris. To improve his knowledge, he rose daily at five o'clock, and
read law-reports and books treating of commercial litigation. His
sense of justice, his rectitude, his conscientious intentions,--
qualities essential to the understanding of questions submitted for
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: Exists but fire, as this same fellow says,
Seems crazed folly. For the man himself
Against the senses by the senses fights,
And hews at that through which is all belief,
Through which indeed unto himself is known
The thing he calls the fire. For, though he thinks
The senses truly can perceive the fire,
He thinks they cannot as regards all else,
Which still are palpably as clear to sense-
To me a thought inept and crazy too.
For whither shall we make appeal? for what
Of The Nature of Things |
