| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: out her campfire with scrupulous care, and to destroy all
rubbish (your true woodsman and mountaineer is as
painstakingly neat as a French housewife).
She was out of doors all day. At night she read for a while
before the fire, but by nine her eyelids were heavy. She
walked down to the Inn sometimes, but not often. One
memorable night she went, with half a dozen others from the
Inn, to the tiny one-room cabin of Oscar, the handy man
about the Inn, and there she listened to one of Oscar's far-
famed phonograph concerts. Oscar's phonograph had cost
twenty-five dollars in Denver. It stood in one corner of
Fanny Herself |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: love. You never suspected this! The faintest glimmer of hope led you
on in pursuit of the sweet vision.
"At last the disappointments of many years have undermined your
patience,--an angel would have lost it long since,--and now the
apparition so long pursued is no more than a shade without substance.
Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this
world. When this thought first struck you, you looked back on your
past youth, sacrificed, if not wasted; you then bitterly discerned the
blunder of nature that had given you a father when you looked for a
husband. You asked yourself whether you had not gone beyond the duty
of a wife in keeping yourself wholly for a man who was bound up in his
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: perhaps none will lightly take the Cynic life upon him. For on
whose account should he embrace that method of life? Suppose
however that he does, there will then be nothing to hinder his
marrying and rearing offspring. For his wife will be even such
another as himself, and likewise her father; and in like manner
will his children be brought up.
But in the present condition of things, which resembles an
Army in battle array, ought not the Cynic to be free from all
distraction and given wholly to the service of God, so that he
can go in and out among men, neither fettered by the duties nor
entangled by the relations of common life? For if he transgress
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
