| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: of slavery, do not, indeed, migrate from the North to the South;
but their situation with regard to the Europeans is not unlike
that of the aborigines of America; they remain half civilized,
and deprived of their rights in the midst of a population which
is far superior to them in wealth and in knowledge; where they
are exposed to the tyranny of the laws *m and the intolerance of
the people. On some accounts they are still more to be pitied
than the Indians, since they are haunted by the reminiscence of
slavery, and they cannot claim possession of a single portion of
the soil: many of them perish miserably, *n and the rest
congregate in the great towns, where they perform the meanest
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: continued in six parts as they entered the large room (windows opening upon
the garden) which Frau Fischer occupied each successive year. I was
reading the "Miracles of Lourdes," which a Catholic priest--fixing a gloomy
eye upon my soul--had begged me to digest; but its wonders were completely
routed by Frau Fischer's arrival. Not even the white roses upon the feet
of the Virgin could flourish in that atmosphere.
"...It was a simple shepherd-child who pastured her flocks upon the
barren fields..."
Voices from the room above: "The washstand has, of course, been scrubbed
over with soda."
"...Poverty-stricken, her limbs with tattered rags half covered..."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: Paris to be clerk with a color-merchant (formerly of Mayenne and a
distant connection of the Orgemonts) made himself a painter simply by
the fact of an obstinacy which constitutes the Breton character. What
he suffered, the manner in which he lived during those years of study,
God only knows. He suffered as much as great men suffer when they are
hounded by poverty and hunted like wild beasts by the pack of
commonplace minds and by troops of vanities athirst for vengeance.
As soon as he thought himself able to fly on his own wings, Fougeres
took a studio in the upper part of the rue des Martyrs, where he began
to delve his way. He made his first appearance in 1819. The first
picture he presented to the jury of the Exhibition at the Louvre
|
