| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: La Grenadiere itself, half-way up the hillside, and about a hundred
paces from the church, is one of those old-fashioned houses dating
back some two or three hundred years, which you find in every
picturesque spot in Touraine. A fissure in the rock affords convenient
space for a flight of steps descending gradually to the "dike"--the
local name for the embankment made at the foot of the cliffs to keep
the Loire in its bed, and serve as a causeway for the highroad from
Paris to Nantes. At the top of the steps a gate opens upon a narrow
stony footpath between two terraces, for here the soil is banked up,
and walls are built to prevent landslips. These earthworks, as it
were, are crowned with trellises and espaliers, so that the steep path
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: save in rare cases, spared by the general turmoil. Those who have
at once the ability, the taste, and the wealth needful for
training themselves to the accomplishment of some many-sided and
permanent work are of course very few. Nor have our universities
yet provided themselves with the means for securing to literary
talent the leisure which is essential to complete mental
development, or to a high order of productiveness. Although in
most industrial enterprises we know how to work together so
successfully, in literature we have as yet no co-operation. We
have not only no Paris, but we have not even a Tubingen, a
Leipsic, or a Jena, or anything corresponding to the fellowships
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: of all the figures on it: the sun, the moon, a hammer, a plumb line, a
trowel, a rough stone and a squared stone, a pillar, three windows,
and so on. Then a place was assigned to Pierre, he was shown the signs
of the Lodge, told the password, and at last was permitted to sit
down. The Grand Master began reading the statutes. They were very
long, and Pierre, from joy, agitation, and embarrassment, was not in a
state to understand what was being read. He managed to follow only the
last words of the statutes and these remained in his mind.
"In our temples we recognize no other distinctions," read the
Grand Master, "but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making any
distinctions which may infringe equality. Fly to a brother's aid
War and Peace |
