| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: not to be understood. Don't let us be severe, don't let us be in
a hurry to condemn him. Let us have patience. I must love him;
and now that I am satisfied on one point, the one material point,
I am sincerely anxious for its all turning out well, and ready
to hope that it may. They must both have suffered a great deal
under such a system of secresy and concealment."
"His sufferings," replied Emma dryly, "do not appear to have done
him much harm. Well, and how did Mr. Churchill take it?"
"Most favourably for his nephew--gave his consent with scarcely
a difficulty. Conceive what the events of a week have done
in that family! While poor Mrs. Churchill lived, I suppose there
Emma |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: regret neither my blood nor my life, but my future and the fortune of
my heart. Your weak hand has overturned my happiness. What hope can I
extort from you in place of all those you have destroyed? You have
brought me down to your level. /To love, to be loved!/ are henceforth
meaningless words to me, as to you. I shall never cease to think of
that imaginary woman when I see a real woman.'
"He pointed to the statue with a gesture of despair.
" 'I shall always have in my memory a divine harpy who will bury her
talons in all my manly sentiments, and who will stamp all other women
with a seal of imperfection. Monster! you, who can give life to
nothing, have swept all women off the face of the earth.'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: will darn for themselves in a few days, easily enough, and drop
them into a basket of wet sea-weed; when you get home turn them
into a dish full of water and leave them for the night, and go to
look at them to-morrow. What a change! The dull lumps of jelly
have taken root and flowered during the night, and your dish is
filled from side to side with a bouquet of chrysanthemums; each has
expanded into a hundred-petalled flower, crimson, pink, purple, or
orange; touch one, and it shrinks together like a sensitive plant,
displaying at the root of the petals a ring of brilliant turquoise
beads. That is the commonest of all the Actiniae
(Mesembryanthemum); you may have him when and where you will: but
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