| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: Israel. Noemi was guarded by two servants, fanatical Jewesses, to say
nothing of an advanced-guard, a Polish Jew, Abramko by name, once
involved in a fabulous manner in political troubles, from which Elie
Magus saved him as a business speculation. Abramko, porter of the
silent, grim, deserted mansion, divided his office and his lodge with
three remarkably ferocious animals--an English bull-dog, a
Newfoundland dog, and another of the Pyrenean breed.
Behold the profound observations of human nature upon which Elie Magus
based his feeling of security, for secure he felt; he left home
without misgivings, slept with both ears shut, and feared no attempt
upon his daughter (his chief treasure), his pictures, or his money. In
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: He was a most unlovely spectacle, but he was far from dead.
As the duel continued I began to gain confidence, for,
to be perfectly candid, I had not expected to survive
the first rush of that monstrous engine of ungoverned
rage and hatred. And I think that Jubal, from utter
contempt of me, began to change to a feeling of respect,
and then in his primitive mind there evidently loomed
the thought that perhaps at last he had met his master,
and was facing his end.
At any rate it is only upon this hypothesis that I can
account for his next act, which was in the nature of a last
At the Earth's Core |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous by Oscar Wilde: Wilde immediately left the only copy in a cab. A few days later he
laughingly informed me of the loss, and added that a cab was a very
proper place for it. I have explained elsewhere that he looked on
his works with disdain in his last years, though he was always full
of schemes for writing others. All my attempts to recover the lost
work failed. The passages here reprinted are from some odd leaves
of a first draft. The play is, of course, not unlike Salome, though
it was written in English. It expanded Wilde's favourite theory
that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your faith in
it; the same motive runs through Mr. W. H. Honorius the hermit, so
far as I recollect the story, falls in love with the courtesan who
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