| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: Here lie the bones of Parson Platt,
Wise, pious, humble and all that,
Who showed us life as all should live it;
Let that be said -- and God forgive it!
ERUDITION, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
So wide his erudition's mighty span,
He knew Creation's origin and plan
And only came by accident to grief --
He thought, poor man, 'twas right to be a thief.
Romach Pute
ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult.
The Devil's Dictionary |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: nothing from my family, nor from my home, beyond my inadequate
allowance. In short, at that time, I breakfasted off a roll which
the baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold me cheap because it was
left from yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into
milk; thus my morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only
every other day in a boarding-house where the meal cost me
sixteen sous. You know as well as I what care I must have taken
of my clothes and shoes. I hardly know whether in later life we
feel grief so deep when a colleague plays us false as we have
known, you and I, on detecting the mocking smile of a gaping seam
in a shoe, or hearing the armhole of a coat split, I drank
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: more painful then to have to look for three at once!--the babies are so nearly
the same age that they only just escaped being twins. But I won't look.
I can imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides,
I don't think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have.
I shall do my best in the years at my disposal to train them so to love
the garden, and out-door life, and even farming, that, if they have a spark
of their mother in them, they will want and ask for nothing better.
My hope of success is however exceedingly small, and there is probably
a fearful period in store for me when I shall be taken every day during
the winter to the distant towns to balls--a poor old mother shivering
in broad daylight in her party gown, and being made to <183> start after
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
