| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: different from other women except in the wrong done me and the
wrong I did, and my very heavy punishments and great disgrace. And
yet, to bear you I had to look on death. To nurture you I had to
wrestle with it. Death fought with me for you. All women have to
fight with death to keep their children. Death, being childless,
wants our children from us. Gerald, when you were naked I clothed
you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Night and day all that
long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, no care too lowly
for the thing we women love - and oh! how I loved YOU. Not Hannah,
Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, and only
love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: refuse the most pedestrian realism. ROBINSON CRUSOE is as
realistic as it is romantic; both qualities are pushed to an
extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the
material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and
deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to conjure
with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the
disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa
is a very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous
stories from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and
stirring an impression of adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at
the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: ducats and the /genovines/--"
"Monsieur, Eugenie is our only child; and even if she had thrown them
into the water--"
"Into the water!" cried her husband; "into the water! You are crazy,
Madame Grandet! What I have said is said; you know that well enough.
If you want peace in this household, make your daughter confess, pump
it out of her. Women understand how to do that better than we do.
Whatever she has done, I sha'n't eat her. Is she afraid of me? Even if
she has plastered Charles with gold from head to foot, he is on the
high seas, and nobody can get at him, hein!"
"But, monsieur--" Excited by the nervous crisis through which she had
Eugenie Grandet |
