| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: and wealth and physical powers, and leads more rapidly to a hospital
than the worst of passions? Men even seem to have more respect for
vices than for genius, since to the latter they refuse credit. The
profits accruing from the hidden labors of the brain are so remote
that the social world fears to square accounts with the man of
learning in his lifetime, preferring to get rid of its obligations by
not forgiving his misfortunes or his poverty.
If, in spite of this inveterate forgetfulness of the present,
Balthazar Claes had abandoned his mysterious abstractions, if some
sweet and companionable meaning had revisited that thoughtful
countenance, if the fixed eyes had lost their rigid strain and shone
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: romances had no love for pleasure and had not tasted the world,
but that for him these were secondary things. The psychology of
his work ought, then, to find an interpretation other than that
afforded by wholly false or exaggerated anecdotes. I wish to
indicate here how this work, illumined by the three or four
positive data which I have given, appears to me to demand it.
And first, what does that anxiety to conceal his personality
prove, carried as it was to such an extreme degree? The answer
rises spontaneously in the minds of those who have studied
closely the history of literature. The absolute silence about
himself, preserved by one whose position among us was that of a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: General Rosas intimated a wish to see me; a circumstance
which I was afterwards very glad of. He is a man of an
extraordinary character, and has a most predominant influence
in the country, which it seems he will use to its prosperity
and advancement. [6] He is said to be the owner of
seventy-four square leagues of land, and to have about three
hundred thousand head of cattle. His estates are admirably
managed, and are far more productive of corn than those of
others. He first gained his celebrity by his laws for his own
estancias, and by disciplining several hundred men, so as to
resist with success the attacks of the Indians. There are
The Voyage of the Beagle |
