| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: "AND did you really walk," said I,
"On such a wretched night?
I always fancied Ghosts could fly -
If not exactly in the sky,
Yet at a fairish height."
"It's very well," said he, "for Kings
To soar above the earth:
But Phantoms often find that wings -
Like many other pleasant things -
Cost more than they are worth.
"Spectres of course are rich, and so
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: difficulty, and with infinite pains, which rendered the youth still
dearer to her; a score of times the doctors had predicted his death,
but, confident in her own presentiments, her own unfailing hope, she
had the happiness of seeing him come safely through the perils of
childhood, with a constitution that was ever improving, in spite of
the warnings of the Faculty.
Thanks to her constant care, this son had grown and developed so much,
and so gracefully, that at twenty years of age, he was thought a most
elegant cavalier at Versailles. Madame de Dey possessed a happiness
which does not always crown the efforts and struggles of a mother. Her
son adored her; their souls understood each other with fraternal
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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: more than a few miserable boat-ribs and two or three bundles of laths;
but below in the port his teeming wood-yard supplies all the cooperage
trade of Anjou. He knows to a plank how many casks are needed if the
vintage is good. A hot season makes him rich, a rainy season ruins
him; in a single morning puncheons worth eleven francs have been known
to drop to six. In this country, as in Touraine, atmospheric
vicissitudes control commercial life. Wine-growers, proprietors, wood-
merchants, coopers, inn-keepers, mariners, all keep watch of the sun.
They tremble when they go to bed lest they should hear in the morning
of a frost in the night; they dread rain, wind, drought, and want
water, heat, and clouds to suit their fancy. A perpetual duel goes on
Eugenie Grandet |
