| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: he will soon recover his tranquillity."
All present began to analyze the conduct of Mademoiselle Gamard with
the keen perceptions which characterize provincials, to whom no one
can deny the talent of knowing how to lay bare the most secret motives
of human actions.
"You don't see the whole thing yet," said an old landowner who knew
the region well. "There is something serious behind all this which I
can't yet make out. The Abbe Troubert is too deep to be fathomed at
once. Our dear Birotteau is at the beginning of his troubles. Besides,
would he be left in peace and comfort even if he did give up his
lodging to Troubert? I doubt it. If Caron came here to tell you that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: enchantress, like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance.
But I was not so callous or so stupid as not to recognize there
also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the
warning--because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to spoil
one's life?--arrested one's attention by its air of wise
profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la
belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole evening. I
tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion of
life as an enterprise that could be mi managed. But I left off
being thoughtful shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted
by no ghosts of the past and by no visions of the future, I
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: spots of this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still,
to a close observer, they are just as perceptible; the
difference is that their media of manifestation are less
trite and familiar than such well-known ones as the
bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf. Many are
not so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to
imagine in considering the general torpidity of a moor
or waste. Winter, in coming to the country hereabout,
advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might have
been successively observed the retreat of the snakes,
the transformation of the ferns, the filling of the pools,
Far From the Madding Crowd |
