| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: wife, who wears Indian jewelry and botanizes! She made Gus take
her all through the glass-houses yesterday, and bothered him to
death by asking him the names of the plants. Fancy treating Gus
as if he were the gardener!
"Mrs. Trenor brought this out in a CRESCENDO of indignation.
"Oh, well, perhaps Lady Cressida will reconcile the Wetheralls to
meeting Carry Fisher," said Miss Bart pacifically.
"I'm sure I hope so! But she is boring all the men horribly, and
if she takes to distributing tracts, as I hear she does, it will
be too depressing. The worst of it is that she would have been so
useful at the right time. You know we have to have the Bishop
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: him read it. Yes, he is an old friend of mine. We knew one another as
schoolfellows."
With that this strange phenomenon, this withered old man, escorted his
guest to the gates of the courtyard, and, after the guest had
departed, ordered the gates to be closed, made the round of the
outbuildings for the purpose of ascertaining whether the numerous
watchmen were at their posts, peered into the kitchen (where, under
the pretence of seeing whether his servants were being properly fed,
he made a light meal of cabbage soup and gruel), rated the said
servants soundly for their thievishness and general bad behaviour, and
then returned to his room. Meditating in solitude, he fell to thinking
Dead Souls |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: the highest period of politeness in England (and it is of the same
date in France) to have been the peaceable part of King Charles
I.'s reign; and from what we read of those times, as well as from
the accounts I have formerly met with from some who lived in that
court, the methods then used for raising and cultivating
conversation were altogether different from ours; several ladies,
whom we find celebrated by the poets of that age, had assemblies at
their houses, where persons of the best understanding, and of both
sexes, met to pass the evenings in discoursing upon whatever
agreeable subjects were occasionally started; and although we are
apt to ridicule the sublime Platonic notions they had, or
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