| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: up to the girls--I mean to your mother and her sister who died so
young. It was a present to them jointly from your uncle Nicholas
B. when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two years
younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of
yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.
She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated
mind in which your mother was far superior. It was her good
sense, the admirable sweetness of her nature, her exceptional
facility and ease in daily relations, that endeared her to every
body. Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral loss
for us all. Had she lived she would have brought the greatest
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: To take them, they had glasses; to correct them, maps.
As regards the optical instruments at their disposal, they had
excellent marine glasses specially constructed for this journey.
They possessed magnifying powers of 100. They would thus have
brought the moon to within a distance (apparent) of less than
2,000 leagues from the earth. But then, at a distance which for
three hours in the morning did not exceed sixty-five miles, and
in a medium free from all atmospheric disturbances, these
instruments could reduce the lunar surface to within less than
1,500 yards!
CHAPTER XI
From the Earth to the Moon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: floor rise as high as the clock-tower of the Tuileries, the infinite
delicacy of the architecture reveals itself to the rapture of our
astonished eyes. This wing of the great building, in which the two
queens, Catherine de' Medici and Mary Stuart, held their sumptuous
court, is divided in the centre by a hexagon tower, in the empty well
of which winds up a spiral staircase,--a Moorish caprice, designed by
giants, made by dwarfs, which gives to this wonderful facade the
effect of a dream. The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral
connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the
tower, requiring at each landing transversal corbels which are
decorated with arabesque carvings without and within. This bewildering
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