| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: note, and the whole body of choristers are wagging their heads before
approaching a climax, and this contrabasso alone is tucking his
bearded chin into his collar, and sinking almost to a squatting
posture on the floor, in order to produce a note which shall cause the
windows to shiver and their panes to crack. Naturally, from a canine
chorus of such executants it might reasonably be inferred that the
establishment was one of the utmost respectability. To that, however,
our damp, cold hero gave not a thought, for all his mind was fixed
upon bed. Indeed, the britchka had hardly come to a standstill before
he leapt out upon the doorstep, missed his footing, and came within an
ace of falling. To meet him there issued a female younger than the
Dead Souls |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: freedom from their childhood onward as matters of course.
The Conflict of Wills
The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both
schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents and
schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are
docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of
naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through
until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when the
parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the
parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed
forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: over the days of his best years; and as it grew more and more easy
to him to open his mind to Dolly Winthrop, he gradually communicated
to her all he could describe of his early life. The communication
was necessarily a slow and difficult process, for Silas's meagre
power of explanation was not aided by any readiness of
interpretation in Dolly, whose narrow outward experience gave her no
key to strange customs, and made every novelty a source of wonder
that arrested them at every step of the narrative. It was only by
fragments, and at intervals which left Dolly time to revolve what
she had heard till it acquired some familiarity for her, that Silas
at last arrived at the climax of the sad story--the drawing of
Silas Marner |
