| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: wait to see it!"
What could I do? I told her in so many words that we had our
unsolved problems, that we had dishonesty and corruption, vice
and crime, disease and insanity, prisons and hospitals; and it
made no more impression on her than it would to tell a South Sea
Islander about the temperature of the Arctic Circle. She could
intellectually see that it was bad to have those things; but she
could not FEEL it.
We had quite easily come to accept the Herland life as normal,
because it was normal--none of us make any outcry over mere health
and peace and happy industry. And the abnormal, to which we are
Herland |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: class of majesty by irregularly clouding her forehead.
"Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than
a narrow band drawn over the brow," says Richter.
Some of the neighbouring girls wore coloured ribbon for the
same purpose, and sported metallic ornaments elsewhere;
but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon and metallic
ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.
Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath? Budmouth
was her native place, a fashionable seaside resort
at that date. She was the daughter of the bandmaster
of a regiment which had been quartered there--a Corfiote
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: whether the weight be of gold or of lead; when, at any rate,
happiness passes into that place in which it becomes identical
with pain, a man may admit that the reign of wisdom is
temporarily suspended. Newman wished Madame de Cintre so well
that nothing he could think of doing for her in the future rose
to the high standard which his present mood had set itself.
She seemed to him so felicitous a product of nature and circumstance
that his invention, musing on future combinations, was constantly
catching its breath with the fear of stumbling into some brutal
compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony.
This is what I mean by Newman's tenderness: Madame de Cintre
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