| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: yielding; when a shrivelled heart has learned to expand and
contract and to beat under this discipline; when the brain has
capitulated--then, perhaps, passion may enter among the steel
springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations
and languors and melting phrases; then you shall see a most
magnificent conflagration (always supposing that the chimney
takes fire). The steel feminine system will glow red-hot like
iron in the forge; that kind of heat lasts longer than any other,
and the glow of it may possibly turn to love.
"Still," he continued, "I have my doubts. And, after all, is
it worth while to take so much trouble with the Duchess? Between
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "She lives, John Carter."
"You have not told me where we are," I reminded him.
"We are where I expected to find you, John Carter--and
another. Many years ago you heard the story of the woman
who taught me the thing that green Martians are reared to
hate, the woman who taught me to love. You know the cruel
tortures and the awful death her love won for her at the
hands of the beast, Tal Hajus.
"She, I thought, awaited me by the Lost Sea of Korus.
"You know that it was left for a man from another world,
for yourself, John Carter, to teach this cruel Thark what
The Gods of Mars |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: daring, but his mind was not more than was needed for the ephemeral
talk and pleasantry of Parisian conversation. And yet it would have
been difficult to find among the young men of fashion in Paris a
single one who was his superior. Young men talk a great deal too much
in these days of horses, money, taxes, deputies; French CONVERSATION
is no longer what it was. Brilliancy of mind needs leisure and certain
social inequalities to bring it out. There is, probably, more real
conversation in Vienna or St. Petersburg than in Paris. Equals do not
need to employ delicacy or shrewdness in speech; they blurt out things
as they are. Consequently the dandies of Paris did not discover the
great seigneur in the rather heedless young fellow who, in their
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