| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: proceedings, which had been so well and ripely advised in the
only courts competent."
"Sir William Ashton," answered the Master, with warmth, "the
lands which you now occupy were granted to my remote ancestor for
services done with his sword against the English invaders. How
they have glided from us by a train of proceedings that seem to
be neither sale, nor mortgage, nor adjudication for debt, but a
nondescript and entangled mixture of all these rights; how annual
rent has been accumulated upon principal, and no nook or coign of
legal advantage left unoccupied, until our interest in our
hereditary property seems to have melted away like an icicle in
The Bride of Lammermoor |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: could not fall asleep again or even calm himself. The more he
tried to think of his accounts, his business, his reputation,
his worth and his wealth, the more and more was he mastered by
fear, and regrets that he had not stayed the night at Grishkino
dominated and mingled in all his thoughts.
'Devil take the forest! Things were all right without it,
thank God. Ah, if we had only put up for the night!' he said
to himself. 'They say it's drunkards that freeze,' he thought,
'and I have had some drink.' And observing his sensations he
noticed that he was beginning to shiver, without knowing
whether it was from cold or from fear. He tried to wrap
Master and Man |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: some planets and comets, and others a sun and fixed stars. And, making a
digression at this stage on the subject of light, I expounded at
considerable length what the nature of that light must be which is found
in the sun and the stars, and how thence in an instant of time it
traverses the immense spaces of the heavens, and how from the planets and
comets it is reflected towards the earth. To this I likewise added much
respecting the substance, the situation, the motions, and all the
different qualities of these heavens and stars; so that I thought I had
said enough respecting them to show that there is nothing observable in
the heavens or stars of our system that must not, or at least may not
appear precisely alike in those of the system which I described. I came
Reason Discourse |
