| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: for one of those inaugural chapters in mating, half
appreciated at the time, that glimmer as a sort of
morning twilight on mountain tops over the mild
undulations of matrimony. The moon rode without
a masking cloud across the ambiguous night blue of
the California sky, a blue that looks like the fire of
strange elements, where the stars glow like silver
coals, and out of whose depths intense shadows of
blue and black fall; shadows in which all the terres-
trial world seems to float and recombine, where
houses are ghosts of ancient selves and men but the
Rezanov |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: but the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to her preserver.
On the third day my mother sickened; her fever was accompanied by the
most alarming symptoms, and the looks of her medical attendants
prognosticated the worst event. On her deathbed the fortitude
and benignity of this best of women did not desert her. She joined
the hands of Elizabeth and myself. "My children," she said,
"my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of
your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father.
Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to my younger children.
Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved
as I have been, is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not
Frankenstein |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: The poor mother had gone through such anxiety for the past two months
that the woollen sleeves which she needed for the coming winter were
not yet finished. This domestic fact, insignificant as it seems, bore
sad results. For want of those sleeves, a chill seized her in the
midst of a sweat caused by a terrible explosion of anger on the part
of her husband.
"I have been thinking, my poor child, that if you had confided your
secret to me we should have had time to write to Monsieur des Grassins
in Paris. He might have sent us gold pieces like yours; though Grandet
knows them all, perhaps--"
"Where could we have got the money?"
Eugenie Grandet |
