| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: Selerier
Father Goriot
Serizy, Comte Hugret de
A Start in Life
A Bachelor's Establishment
Honorine
Modeste Mignon
Serizy, Comtesse de
A Start in Life
The Thirteen
Ursule Mirouet
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Symposium by Xenophon: deem fair. Joyfully will I welcome blindness to all else, if but these
eyes may still behold him and him only. With sleep and night I am sore
vexed, which rob me of his sight; but to daylight and the sun I owe
eternal thanks, for they restore him to me, my heart's joy,
Cleinias.[24]
[20] Or, "beautiful and good."
[21] Or, "whose fair face draws me." Was Cleinias there as a "muta
persona"? Hardly, in spite of {nun}. It is the image of him which
is present to the mind's eye.
[22] Lit. "being beautiful"; but there is a touch of bombast infused
into the speech by the artist. Cf. the speech of Callias ("Hell."
The Symposium |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: and that, when one of the sisters told her she might take her
place, and sponge his forehead, she said, bitterly, she had no
right to do it, that he was no friend of hers. He saw and heard
that, unconscious to all else; he would have known it, if he had
been dead, lying there. It was too late now: why need he think
of what might have been? Yet he did think of it through the long
winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life to come, or
of her, growing more tender and more bitter. Do you wonder at
the remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he
had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face
with God and death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
