| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: Troubert's life; she was able, without misleading Birotteau, to show
him the net so ably woven round him by revenge, and to make him see
the power and great capacity of his enemy, whose hatred to Chapeloud,
under whom he had been forced to crouch for a dozen years, now found
vent in seizing Chapeloud's property and in persecuting Chapeloud in
the person of his friend. The harmless Birotteau clasped his hands as
if to pray, and wept with distress at the sight of human horrors that
his own pure soul was incapable of suspecting. As frightened as though
he had suddenly found himself at the edge of a precipice, he listened,
with fixed, moist eyes in which there was no expression, to the
revelations of his friend, who ended by saying: "I know the wrong I do
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: would stand to it, by the letters he wrote to me, which were
the kindest and most obliging that could be.
I now grew big, and the people where I lodged perceived it,
and began to take notice of it to me, and, as far as civility
would allow, intimated that I must think of removing. This
put me to extreme perplexity, and I grew very melancholy, for
indeed I knew not what course to take. I had money, but no
friends, and was like to have a child upon my hands to keep,
which was a difficult I had never had upon me yet, as the
particulars of my story hitherto make appear.
In the course of this affair I fell very ill, and my melancholy
Moll Flanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: to consider himself at last as a man of action. He had not, however,
on that account ceased to be a man of thought, and the events of the
spring and summer months of that year 1789 in Paris provided him
with abundant matter for reflection. He read there in the raw what
is perhaps the most amazing page in the history of human development,
and in the end he was forced to the conclusion that all his early
preconceptions had been at fault, and that it was such exalted,
passionate enthusiasts as Vilmorin who had been right.
I suspect him of actually taking pride in the fact that he had been
mistaken, complacently attributing his error to the circumstance
that he had been, himself, of too sane and logical a mind to gauge
|
