| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke her--smother her."
The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in this
house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead
thoughts and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!"
she panted. "Why did I ever----"
She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these
family relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it!
They're perfectly comfortable things. They're--comfortable.
Besides---- Oh, they're horrible! We'll change them, right away."
Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----"
She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: till the ground, from which we were taken. How much of it is
tilled? How much of that which is, wisely or well? In the very
centre and chief garden of Europe--where the two forms of parent
Christianity have had their fortresses--where the noble Catholics of
the Forest Cantons, and the noble Protestants of the Vaudois
valleys, have maintained, for dateless ages, their faiths and
liberties--there the unchecked Alpine rivers yet run wild in
devastation; and the marshes, which a few hundred men could redeem
with a year's labour, still blast their helpless inhabitants into
fevered idiotism. That is so, in the centre of Europe! While, on
the near coast of Africa, once the Garden of the Hesperides, an Arab
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: history of their woes, and Marianna told it, making no complaints of
God or men.
"Madame," said Gambara, as she ended, for he was sober, "we are
victims of our own superiority. My music is good. But as soon as music
transcends feeling and becomes an idea, only persons of genius should
be the hearers, for they alone are capable of responding to it! It is
my misfortune that I have heard the chorus of angels, and believed
that men could understand the strains. The same thing happens to women
when their love assumes a divine aspect: men cannot understand them."
This speech was well worth the forty francs bestowed by Massimilla;
she took out a second gold piece, and told Marianna she would write to
Gambara |
