| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: writing to Jude about him till the eve of his landing, when she could
absolutely postpone no longer, though she had known for weeks of his
approaching arrival, and had, as she truly said, visited Aldbrickham
mainly to reveal the boy's existence and his near home-coming to Jude.
This very day on which she had received her former husband's answer
at some time in the afternoon, the child reached the London Docks,
and the family in whose charge he had come, having put him into a cab for
Lambeth and directed the cabman to his mother's house, bade him good-bye,
and went their way.
On his arrival at the Three Horns, Arabella had looked him
over with an expression that was as good as saying, "You are
Jude the Obscure |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: been using an imaginary method to work out an unmeaning conclusion. But
the truth is, that he is carrying on a process which is not either useless
or unnecessary in any age of philosophy. We fail to understand him,
because we do not realize that the questions which he is discussing could
have had any value or importance. We suppose them to be like the
speculations of some of the Schoolmen, which end in nothing. But in truth
he is trying to get rid of the stumblingblocks of thought which beset his
contemporaries. Seeing that the Megarians and Cynics were making knowledge
impossible, he takes their 'catch-words' and analyzes them from every
conceivable point of view. He is criticizing the simplest and most general
of our ideas, in which, as they are the most comprehensive, the danger of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesser Bourgeoisie by Honore de Balzac: concierge nor the curiosity of the other tenants could find anything
to censure.
This tenant, now seventy years of age, had built, in 1829, an outer
stairway, leading from the right wing of the first floor to the
garden, so that he could get there without going through the
courtyard. Half the ground-floor was occupied by a book-stitcher, who
for the last ten years had used the stable and coach-house for
workshops. A book-binder occupied the other half. The binder and the
stitcher lived, each of them, in half the garret rooms over the front
building on the street. The garrets above the rear wings were
occupied, the one on the right by the mysterious tenant, the one on
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