| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: " 'Well, so long as it is acknowledged in writing that this is a
double----'
" 'No!' Gobseck broke in upon me. 'No! Why should I trust you any more
than you trust me?'
"I kept silence.
" 'And furthermore,' he continued, with a sort of good humor, 'you
will give me your advice without charging fees as long as I live, will
you not?'
" 'So be it; so long as there is no outlay.'
" 'Precisely,' said he. "Ah, by the by, you will allow me to go to see
you?' (Plainly the old man found it not so easy to assume the air of
Gobseck |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: Kasincsky,--and I was more than ever inclined to connect the two,--
-also had his mystery, which might, or might not, be identical with
the first. By comparing dates, I found that the entry made
December 27 was three days later than the date of the letter of
"Amelie de----"; and the exclamation "All for naught!"
certainly referred to the disappointment it contained. I now
guessed the "H." in the second entry to mean "Helmine." The two
last suggested a removal to Warsaw from the country. Here was a
little more ground to stand on; but how should I ever get at the
secret?
I took up the torn half of a note, which, after the first
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: writings what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal
writer of history; and no small light will be thrown on the
progress of historical criticism if we strive to collect and
analyse what in Polybius are more or less scattered expressions.
The ideal historian must be contemporary with the events he
describes, or removed from them by one generation only. Where it
is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes of; where
that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and stories
carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in place
of what is true. He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the
experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a
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