| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: icy brow of the woman he had tacitly made his sister.
All was silence. Here death was neither terrible as in the churches,
nor pompous as it makes its way along the streets; no, it was death in
the home, a tender death; here were pomps of the heart, tears drawn
from the eyes of all. Jules sat down beside Jacquet and pressed his
hand; then, without uttering a word, all these persons remained as
they were till morning.
When daylight paled the tapers, Jacquet, foreseeing the painful scenes
which would then take place, drew Jules away into another room. At
this moment the husband looked at the father, and Ferragus looked at
Jules. The two sorrows arraigned each other, measured each other, and
Ferragus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: buck is most powerful at the period when its horns are perfect,
or free from the hairy skin. When in this state the
meat is, of course, quite uneatable; but the Gauchos assert,
that if buried for some time in fresh earth, the taint is
removed. I have somewhere read that the islanders in the
north of Scotland treat the rank carcasses of the fish-eating
birds in the same manner.
The order Rodentia is here very numerous in species:
of mice alone I obtained no less than eight kinds. [4] The
largest gnawing animal in the world, the Hydrochaerus capybara
(the water-hog), is here also common. One which I
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: Prior, however, to the enquiry about the writings of a particular author,
general considerations which equally affect all evidence to the genuineness
of ancient writings are the following: Shorter works are more likely to
have been forged, or to have received an erroneous designation, than longer
ones; and some kinds of composition, such as epistles or panegyrical
orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which
have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the
slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some
affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have
originated in a name or statement really occurring in some classical
author, are also of doubtful credit; while there is no instance of any
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