| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: avoid the expence than the shame, which would move tears and pity
in the most savage and inhuman breast.
The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one
million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two
hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which
number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to
maintain their own children, (although I apprehend there cannot
be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom) but this
being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand
breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand, for those women who
miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the
A Modest Proposal |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he
then studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the
elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to
man who absorbs them, deriving from them a particular expression
of life? Did he work it all out by the power of deduction and
analogy, to which we owe the genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may,
this man was in all the secrets of the human frame; he knew it in
the past and in the future, emphasizing the present.
But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates
did and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards
new worlds? No. Though it is impossible to deny that this
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: save the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however,
dissolving in the pure light of her character, had no longer the
efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fantasies,
by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be
substantiated. There is something truer and more real than what
we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such
better evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice,
though rather by the necessary force of her high attributes than
by any deep and generous faith on his part. But now his spirit
was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the
early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it; he fell down,
Mosses From An Old Manse |
