| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: the glen. Its course is seen full of grasses, like a flooded
meadow; that is the sink! beyond the grave of the grasses,
the bed lies dry. Near this upper part there is a great show
of ruinous pig-walls; a village must have stood near by.
To walk from our house to Wreck Hill (when the path is buried
in fallen trees) takes one about half an hour, I think; to
return, not more than twenty minutes; I daresay fifteen.
Hence I should guess it was three-quarters of a mile. I had
meant to join on my explorations passing eastward by the
sink; but, Lord! how it rains.
(LATER.)
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: seeking information about the unknown lady. After exhausting the good-
humor even of the most indifferent, he had resolved to take advantage
of a moment when the Comtesse de Gondreville seemed to be at liberty,
to ask her the name of the mysterious lady, when he perceived a little
space left clear between the pedestal of the candelabrum and the two
sofas, which ended in that corner. The dance had left several of the
chairs vacant, which formed rows of fortifications held by mothers or
women of middle age; and the Colonel seized the opportunity to make
his way through this palisade hung with shawls and wraps. He began by
making himself agreeable to the dowagers, and so from one to another,
and from compliment to compliment, he at last reached the empty space
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: ages.
What we do see is--I know not whether you will think me
superstitious or old-fashioned, but so I hold--very much what the
earlier books of the Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek
histories, Roman histories, Egyptian histories, Eastern histories,
inscriptions, national epics, legends, fragments of legends--in the
New World as in the Old--all tell the same story. Not the story
without an end, but the story without a beginning. As in the Hindoo
cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise, and the tortoise on--what? No man knows. I do not know.
I only assert deliberately, waiting, as Napoleon says, till the
|
