| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: place between him and Mrs. Weston; and she perceived that his wife,
who was standing immediately above her, was not only listening also,
but even encouraging him by significant glances.--The kind-hearted,
gentle Mrs. Weston had left her seat to join him and say, "Do not
you dance, Mr. Elton?" to which his prompt reply was, "Most readily,
Mrs. Weston, if you will dance with me."
"Me!--oh! no--I would get you a better partner than myself.
I am no dancer."
"If Mrs. Gilbert wishes to dance," said he, "I shall have great pleasure,
I am sure--for, though beginning to feel myself rather an old married man,
and that my dancing days are over, it would give me very great
Emma |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: both for good and for evil; for these men had among them and preserved
faithfully enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of
their race; a literature which I firmly believe, if I am to trust the
experience of 1900 years, is destined to explain all other literatures;
because it has firm hold of the one eternal root-idea which gives life,
meaning, Divine sanction, to every germ or fragment of human truth which
is in any of them. It did so, at least, in Alexandria for the Greek
literature. About the Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a
disciple of Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find in the
sacred books of his nation that which agreed with the deepest
discoveries of Greek philosophy; which explained and corroborated them.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must
feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish.
Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep;
but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us
by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places
she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the
thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. saw it. They could not stop
it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there
was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform
of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience
(she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a
To the Lighthouse |
