| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: perhaps have seemed more becoming. In treating of popular
legends and superstitions, the paths of inquiry are circuitous
enough, and seldom can we reach a satisfactory conclusion
until we have travelled all the way around Robin Hood's barn
and back again. I am sure that the reader would not have
thanked me for obstructing these crooked lanes with the thorns
and brambles of philological and antiquarian discussion, to
such an extent as perhaps to make him despair of ever reaching
the high road. I have not attempted to review, otherwise than
incidentally, the works of Grimm, Muller, Kuhn, Breal, Dasent,
and Tylor; nor can I pretend to have added anything of
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: university. We bit into four pounds of the best cherries and did not find
one specimen without a worm. But what would you? As I remarked to him
afterwards--dear friend, it amounts to this: if one wishes to satisfy the
desires of nature one must be strong enough to ignore the facts of
nature...The conversation is not out of your depth? I have so seldom the
time or opportunity to open my heart to a woman that I am apt to forget."
I looked at him brightly.
"See what a fat one!" cried the Herr Professor. "That is almost a mouthful
in itself; it is beautiful enough to hang from a watch-chain." He chewed
it up and spat the stone an incredible distance--over the garden path into
the flower bed. He was proud of the feat. I saw it. "The quantity of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: journalism; he knew all its ups and downs. Since that evening of his
introduction to the Wooden Galleries, he had been paid for many an
article, and gambled away the money along with the desire to write. He
had filled columns, not once but many times, in the ingenious ways
described by Lousteau on that memorable evening as they went to the
Palais Royal. He was dependent upon Barbet and Braulard; he trafficked
in books and theatre-tickets; he shrank no longer from any attack,
from writing any panegyric; and at this moment he was in some sort
rejoicing to make all he could out of Lousteau before turning his back
on the Liberals. His intimate knowledge of the party would stand him
in good stead in future. And Lousteau, on his side, was privately
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