| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: in love with her that he should care so much what adventures she
had had. He had never for a moment allowed he was in love with
her; therefore nothing could have surprised him more than to
discover he was jealous. What but jealousy could give a man that
sore contentious wish for the detail of what would make him suffer?
Well enough he knew indeed that he should never have it from the
only person who to-day could give it to him. She let him press her
with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him with an exquisite mercy
and breathing equally little the word that would expose her secret
and the word that would appear to deny his literal right to
bitterness. She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: famous magician on the Upper Rhine. The great ethnologist
Castren dug up the same legend in Finland. It is common, as
Dr. Dasent observes, to the Turks and Mongolians; "and a
legend of the wild Samoyeds, who never heard of Tell or saw a
book in their lives relates it, chapter and verse, of one of
their marksmen." Finally, in the Persian poem of Farid-Uddin
Attar, born in 1119, we read a story of a prince who shoots an
apple from the head of a beloved page. In all these stories,
names and motives of course differ; but all contain the same
essential incidents. It is always an unerring archer who, at
the capricious command of a tyrant, shoots from the head of
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: were parted, for he did not leave college till he was eighteen, in the
summer of 1815. He had at that time lost his father and mother about
six months before. Finding no member of his family with whom his soul
could sympathize, expansive still, but, since our parting, thrown back
on himself, he made his home with his uncle, who was also his
guardian, and who, having been turned out of his benefice as a priest
who had taken the oaths, had come to settle at Blois. There Louis
lived for some time; but consumed ere long by the desire to finish his
incomplete studies, he came to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to
drink of science at its highest fount. The old priest, being very fond
of his nephew, left Louis free to spend his whole little inheritance
Louis Lambert |
