| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: his knee, his pipe died beside him. The strangeness of the
situation came over him, sitting there, and left him rather
frightened. He tried to see it from the viewpoint of an outsider,
and found himself incredulous and doubting. McLean would resent
the situation. Even the Portier was a person to reckon with. The
skepticism of the American colony was a thing to fear and avoid.
And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just
manage alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his
resources to cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had
undertaken to shield a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he
would and could.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: invariably brilliant. For instance, the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici,
afterwards Pope under the name of Clement VII., was the illegitimate
son of Giuliano I. Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici was also a bastard,
and came very near being Pope and the head of the family.
Lorenzo II., the father of Catherine, married in 1518, for his second
wife, Madeleine de la Tour de Boulogne, in Auvergne, and died April
25, 1519, a few days after his wife, who died in giving birth to
Catherine. Catherine was therefore orphaned of father and mother as
soon as she drew breath. Hence the strange adventures of her
childhood, mixed up as they were with the bloody efforts of the
Florentines, then seeking to recover their liberty from the Medici.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: to this bird;--indeed, had the tuft appeared under domestication, it would
have been called a monstrosity.
Illustrations of the action of Natural Selection. -- In order to make it
clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to
give one or two imaginary illustrations. Let us take the case of a wolf,
which preys on various animals, securing some by craft, some by strength,
and some by fleetness; and let us suppose that the fleetest prey, a deer
for instance, had from any change in the country increased in numbers, or
that other prey had decreased in numbers, during that season of the year
when the wolf is hardest pressed for food. I can under such circumstances
see no reason to doubt that the swiftest and slimmest wolves would have the
On the Origin of Species |
