| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: drawn. Then, having let down his sleeves, the president requested
the priest to swear in the jury.
The old priest, with his puffy, red face, his brown gown, and his
gold cross and little order, laboriously moving his stiff legs,
came up to the lectern beneath the icon.
The jurymen got up, and crowded towards the lectern.
"Come up, please," said the priest, pulling at the cross on his
breast with his plump hand, and waiting till all the jury had
drawn near. When they had all come up the steps of the platform,
the priest passed his bald, grey head sideways through the greasy
opening of the stole, and, having rearranged his thin hair, he
Resurrection |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: the least use for a frame of mind without square meals; and you
can't get it out of my head that it's a man's duty to die rich, if he
can."
"What for?" I asked him once.
"O, I don't know," he replied. "Why in snakes should anybody
want to be a sculptor, if you come to that? I would love to
sculp myself. But what I can't see is why you should want to
do nothing else. It seems to argue a poverty of nature."
Whether or not he ever came to understand me--and I have
been so tossed about since then that I am not very sure I
understand myself--he soon perceived that I was perfectly in
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli: and these are Francesco Sforza[*] and Cesare Borgia. Francesco, by
proper means and with great ability, from being a private person rose
to be Duke of Milan, and that which he had acquired with a thousand
anxieties he kept with little trouble. On the other hand, Cesare
Borgia, called by the people Duke Valentino, acquired his state during
the ascendancy of his father, and on its decline he lost it,
notwithstanding that he had taken every measure and done all that
ought to be done by a wise and able man to fix firmly his roots in the
states which the arms and fortunes of others had bestowed on him.
[*] Francesco Sforza, born 1401, died 1466. He married Bianca Maria
Visconti, a natural daughter of Filippo Visconti, the Duke of
The Prince |
