| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: busy men, he had allowed the tax-collector to send him a summons for
non-payment of arrears. The landlord forthwith claimed his quarter's
rent from January 1st by sending in a receipt, which the porter's wife
had amused herself by detaining. On the 15th a summons to pay was
served on M. d'Espard, the portress had delivered it at her leisure,
and he supposed it to be some misunderstanding, not conceiving of any
incivility from a man in whose house he had been living for twelve
years. The Marquis was actually seized by a bailiff at the time when
his man-servant had gone to carry the money for the rent to the
landlord.
This arrest, assiduously reported to the persons with whom he was in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: children to wear flannel and not to over-eat themselves, which last
habit she considered the chief reason why people needed doctors.
Lydgate pleaded for those whose fathers and mothers had over-eaten
themselves, but Mrs. Farebrother held that view of things dangerous:
Nature was more just than that; it would be easy for any felon
to say that his ancestors ought to have been hanged instead of him.
If those he had bad fathers and mothers were bad themselves, they were
hanged for that. There was no need to go back on what you couldn't see.
"My mother is like old George the Third," said the Vicar,
"she objects to metaphysics."
"I object to what is wrong, Camden. I say, keep hold of a
Middlemarch |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: XXV
The Wind
I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky;
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies' skirts across the grass--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
A Child's Garden of Verses |
