| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini: possible, and the men are exerting their
strength in the opposite direction in order
to resist it, the girl abruptly ceases the
pressure WITHOUT WARNING and exerts it in
the OPPOSITE DIRECTION. Unprepared for
this change, the victims lose their equilibrium
and find themselves at the mercy
of the girl, and so much the more so in
proportion as they are stronger and their
efforts are greater. The experiment
succeeds still better with three than with two
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking the opposite
line, for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it
would always be for reasons that differed. It came home to me that
he was admirably British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at
my bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my little
French library.
"Of course I've never seen the fellow, but it's clear enough he's a
humbug."
"Clear 'enough' is just what it isn't," I replied; "if it only
were!" That ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of
what was to be later a long ache for final frivolous rest.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the
designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a
name of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the
constant heredity of the same office devolving on the family.
Formerly, in France, Spain, and Italy, when those three countries had,
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mutual interests which
united and disunited them by perpetual warfare, the name Marana served
to express in its general sense, a prostitute. In those days women of
that sort had a certain rank in the world of which nothing in our day
can give an idea. Ninon de l'Enclos and Marian Delorme have alone
played, in France, the role of the Imperias, Catalinas, and Maranas
|
