| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: degraded in my own eyes; and I lack courage - I am a coward! [Sits
down on sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON. If I know you at all, I know that you can't live
with a man who treats you like this! What sort of life would you
have with him? You would feel that he was lying to you every
moment of the day. You would feel that the look in his eyes was
false, his voice false, his touch false, his passion false. He
would come to you when he was weary of others; you would have to
comfort him. He would come to you when he was devoted to others;
you would have to charm him. You would have to be to him the mask
of his real life, the cloak to hide his secret.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: where a human life has been lost, or where some poor peasant has
been delivered from a great peril, and has set up a memorial of his
gratitude.
Stop, traveller, as you pass by, and look at the pictures. They
have little more of art than a child's drawing on a slate; but they
will teach you what it means to earn a living in these mountains.
They tell of the danger that lurks on the steep slopes of grass,
where the mowers have to go down with ropes around their waists,
and in the beds of the streams where the floods sweep through in
the spring, and in the forests where the great trees fall and crush
men like flies, and on the icy bridges where a slip is fatal, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: painful part of the morning dissipated by this conversation,
she re-entered the house so happy as to be obliged to find an alloy
in some momentary apprehensions of its being impossible to last.
An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective
of everything dangerous in such high-wrought felicity; and she went
to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness
of her enjoyment.
The evening came, the drawing-rooms were lighted up, the company assembled.
It was but a card party, it was but a mixture of those who had
never met before, and those who met too often; a commonplace business,
too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety; but Anne had never found
Persuasion |
