| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: by nations entirely different from the Abyssins; their hair is like
that of the other blacks, short and curled. In the year 1615,
Rassela Christos, lieutenant-general to Sultan Segued, entered those
kingdoms with his army in a hostile manner; but being able to get no
intelligence of the condition of the people, and astonished at their
unbounded extent, he returned, without daring to attempt anything.
As the empire of the Abyssins terminates at these deserts, and as I
have followed the course of the Nile no farther, I here leave it to
range over barbarous kingdoms, and convey wealth and plenty into
Egypt, which owes to the annual inundations of this river its envied
fertility. I know not anything of the rest of its passage, but that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: unskilled hands--even our own."
"But a mother's love--" I ventured.
She studied my face, trying to work out a means of clear explanation.
"You told us about your dentists," she said, at length, "those
quaintly specialized persons who spend their lives filling little
holes in other persons' teeth--even in children's teeth sometimes."
"Yes?" I said, not getting her drift.
"Does mother-love urge mothers--with you--to fill their
own children's teeth? Or to wish to?"
"Why no--of course not," I protested. "But that is a highly
specialized craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman
Herland |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: critics, but from which the friction of mere personal intercourse
was not the sort of process to extract a revealing spark. He
accepted without a question both his fever and his chill, and the
only thing he touched with judgment was this convenience of my
friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but the matter
comes back in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of
my having had to put it together for him. He took it from me in
this form without a groan, and I gave it him quite as it came; he
took it again and again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if
for the very purpose of learning how idiotically he was in love.
He told me I made him see things: to begin with, hadn't I first
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