| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: fall bigger and bigger continually. And thus does wise Madam How
stand in no need of bricklayers, but makes her chimneys build
themselves.
And why is the mouth of the chimney called a crater?
Crater, as you know, is Greek for a cup. And the mouth of these
chimneys, when they have become choked and stopped working, are
often just the shape of a cup, or (as the Germans call them)
kessels, which means kettles, or caldrons. I have seen some of
them as beautifully and exactly rounded as if a cunning engineer
had planned them, and had them dug out with the spade. At first,
of course, their sides and bottom are nothing but loose stones,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: deserve such suffering?--so kind as he is!"
I accompanied her downstairs and assisted her in getting into the
carriage, and there I saw her father bent almost double.
Mademoiselle Taillefer tried to stifle his moans by putting her
handkerchief to his mouth; unhappily he saw me; his face became even
more distorted, a convulsive cry rent the air, and he gave me a
dreadful look as the carriage rolled away.
That dinner, that evening exercised a cruel influence on my life and
on my feelings. I loved Mademoiselle Taillefer, precisely, perhaps,
because honor and decency forbade me to marry the daughter of a
murderer, however good a husband and father he might be. A curious
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: for the first offence, and Expulsion for the second.
But among the lower classes the art of Sight Recognition is regarded
as an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford
to let his son spend a third of his life in abstract studies.
The children of the poor are therefore allowed to "feel"
from their earliest years, and they gain thereby a precocity
and an early vivacity which contrast at first most favourably with
the inert, undeveloped, and listless behaviour of the half-instructed
youths of the Polygonal class; but when the latter have at last
completed their University course, and are prepared to put
their theory into practice, the change that comes over them
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
