| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: `What did you mean it to be made of?' Alice asked, hoping to
cheer him up, for the poor Knight seemed quite low-spirited about it.
`It began with blotting paper,' the Knight answered with a groan.
`That wouldn't be very nice, I'm afraid--'
`Not very nice ALONE,' he interrupted, quite eagerly: `but
you've no idea what a difference it makes mixing it with other
things--such as gunpowder and sealing-wax. And here I must
leave you.' They had just come to the end of the wood.
Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding.
`You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: `let me sing
you a song to comfort you.'
Through the Looking-Glass |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: learn the truth in order to stop this gossip, at any rate among the
circle of my own friends. To be the dupes or the accomplices of such
an error is too false a position for true friends to occupy."
"But what is it? what has happened?" asked mother and daughter.
Madame de Gyas thereupon allowed herself the happiness of repeating
all the current gossip, not sparing her two friends a single stab.
Natalie and Madame Evangelista looked at each other and laughed, but
they fully understood the meaning of the tale and the motives of their
friend. The Spanish lady took her revenge very much as Celimene took
hers on Arsinoe.
"My dear, are you ignorant--you who know the provinces so well--can
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad
is educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It
must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed
Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when
years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will
be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome,
and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use
spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good
enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless
|
