| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: house, which sooner or later, will be your own if you like it.
Now, plainly, will you still receive me then as a father, or will
you make me happy?
"Forgive me for writing so frankly, but when I am with you I lose
all courage; I feel too keenly that you are indeed my mistress. I
have no wish to hurt you; I only want to tell you how much I
suffer, and how hard it is to wait at my age, when every day takes
with it some hopes and some pleasures. Besides, the delicacy of my
conduct is a guarantee of the sincerity of my intentions. Have I
ever behaved as your creditor? You are like a citadel, and I am
not a young man. In answer to my appeals, you say your life is at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: them come on my side of the island, and so near to me; but when I
considered their coming must be always with the current of the ebb,
I began afterwards to be more sedate in my mind, being satisfied
that I might go abroad with safety all the time of the flood of
tide, if they were not on shore before; and having made this
observation, I went abroad about my harvest work with the more
composure.
As I expected, so it proved; for as soon as the tide made to the
westward I saw them all take boat and row (or paddle as we call it)
away. I should have observed, that for an hour or more before they
went off they were dancing, and I could easily discern their
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: others vanished, and it had grown very great by the time it was the
only ghost of one they possessed. They had literally watched it
take to itself a portion of the substance of each that had
departed; and it became prodigious now, when they could talk of it
together, when they could look back at it across a desert of
accepted derogation, and when, above all, they could together work
up a credulity about it that neither could otherwise work up.
Nothing was really so marked as that they felt the need to
cultivate this legend much more after having found their feet and
stayed their stomachs in the ultimate obscure than they had done in
the upper air of mere frequent shocks. The thing they could now
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