| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: merely because I would be as angry with her as possible. Even then,
I was not such a fool as not to mean to be reconciled in time;
but I was the injured person, injured by her coldness, and I went
away determined that she should make the first advances.--I shall
always congratulate myself that you were not of the Box Hill party.
Had you witnessed my behaviour there, I can hardly suppose you would
ever have thought well of me again. Its effect upon her appears
in the immediate resolution it produced: as soon as she found I
was really gone from Randalls, she closed with the offer of that
officious Mrs. Elton; the whole system of whose treatment of her,
by the bye, has ever filled me with indignation and hatred.
Emma |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: LORD GORING. He walks in the mire. Of course I am only talking
generally about life.
LADY CHILTERN. [Gravely.] I hope so. Why do you look at me so
strangely, Lord Goring?
LORD GORING. Lady Chiltern, I have sometimes thought that . . .
perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life. I think
that . . . often you don't make sufficient allowances. In every
nature there are elements of weakness, or worse than weakness.
Supposing, for instance, that - that any public man, my father, or
Lord Merton, or Robert, say, had, years ago, written some foolish
letter to some one . . .
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: But of works of art little can be said; their influence is
profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould
by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered,
yet know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic
that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh
and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me
fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I
think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived:
the ESSAIS of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture
of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of
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