| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: and he saw no agreeable alternative if he gave them up; besides,
he had lately made a debt which galled him extremely, and old
Featherstone had almost bargained to pay it off. The whole affair
was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations
were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he
would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes.
Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropic bitterness.
To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable
heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and
Vyan--certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow,
with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare: Doe not you feele it thaw you?
PALAMON.
Stay, Ile tell you after a draught or two more.
ARCITE.
Spare it not, the Duke has more, Cuz: Eate now.
PALAMON.
Yes.
ARCITE.
I am glad you have so good a stomach.
PALAMON.
I am gladder I have so good meate too't.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: nurturing care, with the white draperies of a love that was wholly
maternal; while my love for her, seraphic in her presence, seared me
as with hot irons when away from her. I loved her with a double love
which shot its arrows of desire, and then lost them in the sky, where
they faded out of sight in the impermeable ether. If you ask me why,
young and ardent, I continued in the deluding dreams of Platonic love,
I must own to you that I was not yet man enough to torture that woman,
who was always in dread of some catastrophe to her children, always
fearing some outburst of her husband's stormy temper, martyrized by
him when not afflicted by the illness of Jacques or Madeleine, and
sitting beside one or the other of them when her husband allowed her a
The Lily of the Valley |
