| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: accept only as one more tribute of flattery? But we cannot help
rushing with all our might towards happiness, or being attracted
to the life of love as a plant is to the light; we must have been
very unhappy before we can conquer the torment, the anguish of
those secret deliberations when reason proves to us by a thousand
arguments how barren our yearning must be if it remains buried in
our hearts, and when hopes bid us dare everything.
"I was happy when I admired you in silence; I was so lost in the
contemplation of your beautiful soul, that only to see you left me
hardly anything further to imagine. And I should not now have
dared to address you if I had not heard that you were leaving.
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: float; and the Spider slips down, in spite of her persistent,
forward striving. She is at last brought back to the branch by the
falling threads. Here, the ascent is soon renewed, either on a
fresh thread, if the supply of silk be not yet exhausted, or on a
strange thread, the work, of those who have gone before.
As a rule, the ceiling is reached. It is twelve feet high. The
little Spider is able, therefore, as the first product of her
spinning-mill, before taking any refreshment, to obtain a line
fully twelve feet in length. And all this, the rope-maker and her
rope, was contained in the egg, a particle of no size at all. To
what a degree of fineness can the silky matter be wrought wherewith
The Life of the Spider |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: By one with art enough to cleave the walls
Of heaven with his cadence, but without
The wisdom or the will to comprehend
The strangeness of his own perversity,
And all without the courage to deny
The profit and the pride of his defeat.
VI
While we are drilled in error, we are lost
Alike to truth and usefulness. We think
We are great warriors now, and we can brag
Like Titans; but the world is growing young,
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