| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of
jealousy. She wanted to live two lives--the life of the world and the
life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-
night performance, and could detect in him many impulses of wounded
vanity, for her black attire rubbed off, as it were, on him, clouding
his brow, and sometimes leading him to be quite brutal. He was really
the woman of the two; and he had all a woman's exacting perversity; he
would reproach Dinah for the dowdiness of her appearance, even while
benefiting by the sacrifice, which to a mistress is so cruel--exactly
like a woman who, after sending a man through a gutter to save her
honor, tells him she "cannot bear dirt!" when he comes out.
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but
seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to
make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten
investigations; not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as
first suggested them; but because they involved much
physiological truth and lay in the path of his proposed scheme
for the treatment of Georgiana.
As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory, Georgiana was
cold and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with
intent to reassure her, but was so startled with the intense glow
of the birthmark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: description of the stately palm and other noble tropical
plants, then birds, and lastly man, taking possession of
the coral islets as soon as formed, in the Pacific, is probably
not correct; I fear it destroys the poetry of this story, that
feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insects and spiders
should be the first inhabitants of newly formed oceanic
land.
The smallest rock in the tropical seas, by giving a foundation
for the growth of innumerable kinds of seaweed and
compound animals, supports likewise a large number of fish.
The sharks and the seamen in the boats maintained a constant
The Voyage of the Beagle |
