| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: name was Durand, but he had had the weakness to discard the name of a
worthy father, a merchant who had made a large fortune under the
Revolution. His wife was sole heiress of the Chessels, an old
parliamentary family under Henry IV., belonging to the middle classes,
as did most of the Parisian magistrates. Ambitious of higher flights
Monsieur de Chessel endeavored to smother the original Durand. He
first called himself Durand de Chessel, then D. de Chessel, and that
made him Monsieur de Chessel. Under the Restoration he entailed an
estate with the title of count in virtue of letters-patent from Louis
XVIII. His children reaped the fruits of his audacity without knowing
what it cost him in sarcastic comments. Parvenus are like monkeys,
The Lily of the Valley |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: workmen specialists, technically trained, and therefore
themselves qualified for individual command in the factories.
Meanwhile there was nothing against the employment of
Political Commissars in the factories as formerly in the
regiments, to control in other than technical matters the
doings of the specialists. On the other hand, it was said that
the appointment of Commissars would tend to make
Communists unpopular, since inevitably in many cases they
would have to support the specialists against the workmen,
and that the collegiate system made the workmen feel that
they were actually the masters, and so gave possibilities of
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard: deeper into the mud. I remember kicking it in the stomach. After this
I remember no more, except a kind of wild dream in which I rehearsed all
the scene in the dwarf's hut, and his request that when I met the
buffalo with the cleft horn in the pool of a dried river, I should
remember that he was nothing but a "poor old Kafir cheat."
After this I saw my mother bending over a little child in my bed in the
old house in Oxfordshire where I was born, and then--blackness!
I came to myself again and saw, instead of my mother, the stately figure
of Saduko bending over me upon one side, and on the other that of Scowl,
the half-bred Hottentot, who was weeping, for his hot tears fell upon my
face.
Child of Storm |
