| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: it, but here are a few of the more interesting things from the
period of the eighties.
THE LETTER-BOX
THE old fogy continues his questions. Why, when women or old men
enter the room, does every well-bred person not only offer them a
seat, but give them up his own?
Why do they make Ushakóf or some Servian officer who
comes to pay a visit necessarily stay to tea or dinner?
Why is it considered wrong to let an older person or a woman
help you on with your overcoat?
And why are all these charming rules considered obligatory
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: is a truth of which every democratic nation ought to be
thoroughly persuaded.
I do not doubt that the social and political constitution of
a people predisposes them to adopt a certain belief and certain
tastes, which afterwards flourish without difficulty amongst
them; whilst the same causes may divert a people from certain
opinions and propensities, without any voluntary effort, and, as
it were, without any distinct consciousness, on their part. The
whole art of the legislator is correctly to discern beforehand
these natural inclinations of communities of men, in order to
know whether they should be assisted, or whether it may not be
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: discovers with dismay that the best years of her life are over, and
she has had no joy of them; when she sees her roses wither, and the
longing for love is revived again with the desire to linger yet for a
little on the last smiles of youth. Her nobler qualities dealt so many
wounds to her soul at the moment when the cold of the provinces seized
upon her. She would have died of grief like the ermine if by chance
she had been sullied by contact with those men whose thoughts are bent
on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride
saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so
much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the
emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life,
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