| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me."
His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a table, reading
aloud to Francisque and Juan from a Spanish Cervantes, while the boys
followed her pronunciation of the words from the text. They all three
stopped and looked at Diard, who stood in the doorway with his hands
in his pockets; overcome, perhaps, by finding himself in this calm
scene, so softly lighted, so beautiful with the faces of his wife and
children. It was a living picture of the Virgin between her son and
John.
"Juana, I have something to say to you."
"What has happened?" she asked, instantly perceiving from the livid
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: and that cut him. Not one suggestion that he look at his own record--
and she could have made, oh, so many, and such blistering ones!
Her generous silence brought a swift revenge, for it turned his
thoughts upon himself, it summoned before him a spectral procession,
a moving vision of his life as he had been leading it these past
few years of limitless prosperity, and as he sat there reviewing
it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation.
Look at her life--how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look
at his own--how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish,
how empty, how ignoble! And its trend--never upward, but downward,
ever downward!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: lively and distinct, if not more so than in our waking moments, reason
further dictates that, since all our thoughts cannot be true because of
our partial imperfection, those possessing truth must infallibly be found
in the experience of our waking moments rather than in that of our dreams.
PART V
I would here willingly have proceeded to exhibit the whole chain of truths
which I deduced from these primary but as with a view to this it would
have been necessary now to treat of many questions in dispute among the
earned, with whom I do not wish to be embroiled, I believe that it will be
better for me to refrain from this exposition, and only mention in general
what these truths are, that the more judicious may be able to determine
Reason Discourse |
