| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: the answers, which are always truths supposed to be good for me to hear.
'Why do you wear your hair on your forehead?' she asks,--and that sets me off
wondering why I do wear it on my forehead, and what she wants to know for,
or whether she does know and only wants to know if I will answer truthfully.
'I am sure I don't know, aunt,' I say meekly, after puzzling over it
for ever so long; 'perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring and ask her?'
And then she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly line she says
I have down the middle of my forehead, and that betokens a listless and
discontented disposition. Well, if she knew, what did she ask me for?
Whenever I am with them they ask me riddles like that, and I simply lead
a dog's life. Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs,--useful sometimes,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: exchanged many a confidence. With what dramatic interest was poor
Bettina invested in the eyes of the innocent Modeste? Bettina knew
love through sorrow only, and she was dying of it. Among young girls
every man, scoundrel though he be, is still a lover. Passion is the
one thing absolutely real in the things of life, and it insists on its
supremacy. Charles d'Estourny, gambler, criminal, and debauchee,
remained in the memory of the sisters, the elegant Parisian of the
fetes of Havre, the admired of the womenkind. Bettina believed she had
carried him off from the coquettish Madame Vilquin, and to Modeste he
was her sister's happy lover. Such adoration in young girls is
stronger than all social condemnations. To Bettina's thinking, justice
Modeste Mignon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: Never did party open its campaign with larger means at its disposal and
under more favorable auspices.
The shipwrecked pure republicans found themselves in the legislative
National Assembly melted down to a clique of fifty men, with the African
Generals Cavaignac, Lamorciere and Bedeau at its head. The great
Opposition party was, however, formed by the Mountain. This
parliamentary baptismal name was given to itself by the Social
Democratic party. It disposed of more than two hundred votes out of the
seven hundred and fifty in the National Assembly, and, hence, was at
least just as powerful as any one of the three factions of the party of
Order. Its relative minority to the total royalist coalition seemed
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