| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: without bowing, followed by Bouvard, who called to him from behind.
"Well, what do you say? what do you say?"
"I think I am mad, Bouvard," answered Minoret from the steps of the
porte-cochere. "If that woman tells the truth about Ursula,--and none
but Ursula can know the things that sorceress has told me,--I shall
say that YOU ARE RIGHT. I wish I had wings to fly to Nemours this
minute and verify her words. But I shall hire a carriage and start at
ten o'clock to-night. Ah! am I losing my senses?"
"What would you say if you knew of a life-long incurable disease
healed in a moment; if you saw that great magnetizer bring sweat in
torrents from an herpetic patient, or make a paralyzed woman walk?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as
a GENIUS LOCI. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks
overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid
breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner. The
garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I
take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for
me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can
say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me
it will be ever impotent.
The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: thought I never should return to this childishness. Yet it is not
childishness, but converse with my own self, with this real
divine self which lives in every man. All this time that I slept
there was no one for me to converse with. I was awakened by an
extraordinary event on the 28th of April, in the Law Court, when
I was on the jury. I saw her in the prisoners' dock, the Katusha
betrayed by me, in a prisoner's cloak, condemned to penal
servitude through a strange mistake, and my own fault. I have
just been to the Procureur's and to the prison, but I was not
admitted. I have resolved to do all I can to see her, to confess
to her, and to atone for my sin, even by a marriage. God help me.
Resurrection |
