| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: the advantages of neither) of having a picnic with servants to wait
upon you, had not yet reached this out-of-the-way region--and of course
the gentlemen did not even take their places until the ladies had been
duly provided with all imaginable creature-comforts. Then I supplied
myself with a plate of something solid and a glass of something fluid,
and found a place next to Lady Muriel.
It had been left vacant--apparently for Arthur, as a distinguished
stranger: but he had turned shy, and had placed himself next to the
young lady in spectacles, whose high rasping voice had already cast
loose upon Society such ominous phrases as "Man is a bundle of
Qualities!", "the Objective is only attainable through the Subjective!".
Sylvie and Bruno |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: cells to swarm along the boulevards, glides like a serpent of a
thousand coils through the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries,
saluting the hymeneal magnificence which the country puts on; on one
of these joyous days, then, a young man as beautiful as the day
itself, dressed with taste, easy of manner--to let out the secret he
was a love-child, the natural son of Lord Dudley and the famous
Marquise de Vordac--was walking in the great avenue of the Tuileries.
This Adonis, by name Henri de Marsay, was born in France, when Lord
Dudley had just married the young lady, already Henri's mother, to an
old gentleman called M. de Marsay. This faded and almost extinguished
butterfly recognized the child as his own in consideration of the life
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: murmur, and give forth delicately mournful sounds, and the traveller,
pausing in inexplicable sadness, hears them, and heeds not the fading
light, nor the gay songs of the peasants which float in the air as
they return from their labours in meadow and stubble-field, nor the
distant rumble of the passing waggon.
"Am not I worthy of eternal pity? Is not the mother that bore me
unhappy? Is it not a bitter lot which has befallen me? Art not thou a
cruel executioner, fate? Thou has brought all to my feet--the highest
nobles in the land, the richest gentlemen, counts, foreign barons, all
the flower of our knighthood. All loved me, and any one of them would
have counted my love the greatest boon. I had but to beckon, and the
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
