| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: the stubbles collecting a drove of pigs (for, without any apology,
that is what they are called) gave a blast of his horn to bring them
together, and forthwith it seemed to Don Quixote to be what he was
expecting, the signal of some dwarf announcing his arrival; and so
with prodigious satisfaction he rode up to the inn and to the
ladies, who, seeing a man of this sort approaching in full armour
and with lance and buckler, were turning in dismay into the inn,
when Don Quixote, guessing their fear by their flight, raising his
pasteboard visor, disclosed his dry dusty visage, and with courteous
bearing and gentle voice addressed them, "Your ladyships need not
fly or fear any rudeness, for that it belongs not to the order of
Don Quixote |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: shrink from letting us feel the superiority of their feelings, and
hide their pain as gladly as they silence their wishes: but, having
higher ambitions in love than men, they desire to wed not only the
heart of a husband, but his mind.
To Madame Claes the sense of knowing nothing of a science which
absorbed her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty
of a rival might have caused. The struggle of woman against woman
gives to her who loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a
mortification like this only proved Madame Claes's powerlessness and
humiliated the feelings by which she lived. She was ignorant; and she
had reached a point where her ignorance parted her from her husband.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: Oriental is something whose very character seems strange to us, and
when in addition we consider that it permeates the entire people
from the commonest coolie to the most aesthetic courtier, it becomes
to our comprehension a state of things little short of inexplicable.
To call it artistic sensibility is to use too limited a term, for it
pervades the entire people; rather is it a sixth sense of a natural,
because national description; for the trait differs from our
corresponding feeling in degree, and especially in universality
enough to merit the distinction. Their care for tree flowers is not
confined to a cultivation, it is a cult. It approaches to a sort of
natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified.
|
