| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: me, for I had last joined the class. Though we still had some time to
wait before lessons were over, we all stood up to look at Louis
Lambert. Monsieur Mareschal heard our mutterings, saw how eager we
were, and said, with the kindness that endeared him to us all:
"Well, well, but make no noise; do not disturb the other classes."
These words set us free to play some little time before breakfast, and
we all gathered round Lambert while Monsieur Mareschal walked up and
down the courtyard with Father Haugoult.
There were about eighty of us little demons, as bold as birds of prey.
Though we ourselves had all gone through this cruel novitiate, we
showed no mercy on a newcomer, never sparing him the mockery, the
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: sought to dissuade him, urging the dangers of the place; in
vain that I begged to be allowed to follow, pleading the
black blood that I now knew to circulate in my veins: to all
my appeals he turned a deaf ear, and, bending back a portion
of the screen of bushes, disappeared into the pestilential
silence of the swamp.
At the end of a full hour, the bushes were once more thrust
aside; and my father stepped from out the thicket, and paused
and almost staggered in the first shock of the blinding
sunlight. His face was of a singular dusky red; and yet for
all the heat of the tropical noon, he did not seem to sweat.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: our generals must needs be richer than our kings." He asked,
what business we had out of our own islands, unless upon the
score of trade, or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our
fleet?" Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary
standing army, in the midst of peace, and among a free people.
He said, "if we were governed by our own consent, in the persons
of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were
afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my
opinion, whether a private man's house might not be better
defended by himself, his children, and family, than by
half-a-dozen rascals, picked up at a venture in the streets for
Gulliver's Travels |
