| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: to measure the depths which separate faculties from feelings; the
former proceed from the head, the latter from the heart. A man can be
a great man and a wicked one, just as he can be a fool and a devoted
lover. D'Arthez is one of those privileged beings in whom shrewdness
of mind and a broad expanse of the qualities of the brain do not
exclude either the strength or the grandeur of sentiments. He is, by
rare privilege, equally a man of action and a man of thought. His
private life is noble and generous. If he carefully avoided love, it
was because he knew himself, and felt a premonition of the empire such
a passion would exercise upon him.
For several years the crushing toil by which he prepared the solid
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion
he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he
read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers.
To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's
devotion was something mote, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara
Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit,
small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she
was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes,
she had never even dreamed.
Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and
behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: and uneasiness are perhaps inevitable; at any rate, they teach me
not to be proud after the flights which have borne me to the skies
where I have gathered a full harvest of thoughts; for it is always
after some long excursion in the vast fields of the intellect, and
after the most luminous speculations, that I tumble, broken and
weary, into this limbo. At such a moment, my angel, a wife would
double my love for her--at any rate, she might. If she were
capricious, ailing, or depressed, she would need the comforting
overflow of ingenious affection, and I should not have a glance to
bestow on her. It is my shame, Pauline, to have to tell you that
at times I could weep with you, but that nothing could make me
Louis Lambert |
