| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: all. The sudden flashes emitted by my lantern have no power to
distract her from her task. She continues to turn in the light
even as she turned in the dark, neither faster nor slower. This is
a good omen for the experiment which I have in view.
The first Sunday in August is the feast of the patron saint of the
village, commemorating the Finding of St. Stephen. This is
Tuesday, the third day of the rejoicings. There will be fireworks
to-night, at nine o'clock, to conclude the merry-makings. They
will take place on the high-road outside my door, at a few steps
from the spot where my Spider is working. The spinstress is busy
upon her great spiral at the very moment when the village big-wigs
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare: Then, presently, we fall; and, as a shade
Follows the body, so we follow death.
If, then, we hunt for death, why do we fear it?
If we fear it, why do we follow it?
If we do fear, how can we shun it?
If we do fear, with fear we do but aide
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner:
If we fear not, then no resolved proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate;
For, whether ripe or rotten, drop we shall,
As we do draw the lottery of our doom.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: did she guess all sorts of impossible things, such as, almost on
the very spot, the presence of drama at a critical stage and the
nature of the tie with the gentleman at the Hotel Brighton? More
than ever before it floated to her through the bars of the cage
that this at last was the high reality, the bristling truth that
she had hitherto only patched up and eked out--one of the
creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness
actually met, and who, in the air they made, bloomed with an
unwitting insolence. What came home to the girl was the way the
insolence was tempered by something that was equally a part of the
distinguished life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less
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