| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: law of a nation's existence during that strange time. Surely
they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria
in the whole history of mechanical invention.
And then cheap things of gas and basket-work made an end of them
altogether, smiting out of the sky!...
Never before had Bert Smallways seen pure destruction, never had
he realised the mischief and waste of war. His startled mind
rose to the conception; this also is in life. Out of all this
fierce torrent of sensation one impression rose and became
cardinal--the impression of the men of the Theodore Roosevelt who
had struggled in the water after the explosion of the first bomb.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: severe to her Rosalie, that she replied one day to the Archbishop, who
blamed her for being too hard on the child, "Leave me to manage her,
monseigneur. I know her! She has more than one Beelzebub in her skin!"
The Baroness kept all the keener watch over her daughter, because she
considered her honor as a mother to be at stake. After all, she had
nothing else to do. Clotilde de Rupt, at this time five-and-thirty,
and as good as widowed, with a husband who turned egg-cups in every
variety of wood, who set his mind on making wheels with six spokes out
of iron-wood, and manufactured snuff-boxes for everyone of his
acquaintance, flirted in strict propriety with Amedee de Soulas. When
this young man was in the house, she alternately dismissed and
Albert Savarus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: dilettanteism are to be seen in every field; he is a bad fencer, a
second-rate horseman, dancer, shot; he sings - I have heard him -
and he sings like a child; he writes intolerable verses in more than
doubtful French; he acts like the common amateur; and in short there
is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does badly.
His one manly taste is for the chase. In sum, he is but a plexus of
weaknesses; the singing chambermaid of the stage, tricked out in
man's apparel, and mounted on a circus horse. I have seen this poor
phantom of a prince riding out alone or with a few huntsmen,
disregarded by all, and I have been even grieved for the bearer of
so futile and melancholy an existence. The last Merovingians may
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