| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: seemed pretty and sweet, if no more; and then she
would have shown how kind and inoffensive a woman's
"No" can sometimes be. But to give such cool advice
-- the very advice she had asked for -- it ruffled our
heroine all the afternoon.
CHAPTER LII
CONVERGING COURSES
I
CHRISTMAS-EVE came, and a party that Boldwood
was to give in the evening was the great subject of talk
in Weatherbury. It was not that the rarity of Christmas
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: feet and made thee hideous. Yet, even then, men with the eagle power
of vision said to thee in a glance, 'Thou shalt perish ingloriously,
because thou hast fallen away, because thou hast broken the vows of
thy maidenhood. The angel with peace written on her forehead, who
should have shed light and joy along her path, has been a Messalina,
delighting in the circus, in debauchery, and abuse of power. The days
of thy virginity cannot return; henceforward thou shalt be subject to
a master. Thy hour has come; the hand of death is upon thee. Thy heirs
believe that thou art rich; they will kill thee and find nothing. Yet
try at least to fling away this raiment no longer in fashion; be once
more as in the days of old!--Nay, thou art dead, and by thy own deed!'
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: dared to set foot there between sun-set and rise, in the daytime they
used these paths freely enough. But I suppose that they also held that
this evil-omened field of death had some spirit of its own, some
invisible but imminent fiend, who needed to be propitiated, lest soon he
should claim them also.
This was their method of propitiation, a common one enough, I believe,
in many lands, though what may be its meaning I cannot tell. As the
traveller came to those spots where the paths cut across each other, he
took a stone and threw it on to a heap that had been accumulated there
by the hands of other travellers. There were many such heaps upon the
hill, over a dozen, I think, and the size of them was great. I should
Marie |
