| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: head of his friend to be cut off,--a figure that nothing can explain
but his remorse for having avenged his father on his mother. Was he a
Catholic Hamlet, or merely the victim of incurable disease? But the
undying worm which gnawed at the king's vitals was in Ernest's case
simply distrust of himself,--the timidity of a man to whom no woman
had ever said, "Ah, how I love thee!" and, above all, the spirit of
self-devotion without an object. After hearing the knell of the
monarchy in the fall of his patron's ministry, the poor fellow had
next fallen upon a rock covered with exquisite mosses, named Canalis;
he was, therefore, still seeking a power to love, and this spaniel-
like search for a master gave him outwardly the air of a king who has
Modeste Mignon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than
in philosophy.
Dorothea left Ladislaw's two letters unread on her husband's
writing-table and went to her own place, the scorn and indignation
within her rejecting the reading of these letters, just as we
hurl away any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected
of mean cupidity. She did not in the least divine the subtle
sources of her husband's bad temper about these letters:
she only knew that they had caused him to offend her. She began
to work at once, and her hand did not tremble; on the contrary,
in writing out the quotations which had been given to her the
Middlemarch |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or
ranked him as an altruist with the scientific and sentimental. But
he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he has, of course,
for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for the lowly,
for the wretched; but he has far more pity for the rich, for the
hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming
slaves to things, for those who wear soft raiment and live in
kings' houses. Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really
greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow. And as for altruism, who
knew better than he that it is vocation not volition that
determines us, and that one cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs
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