| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: love--as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men--
and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in
one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him
indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from
the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a
woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty
able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she
ceased to think of him.
One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and
refused to be shaken off. "If I have so much effect on others, on
this man, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so
Anna Karenina |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: bond between members of the same family, which, like all natural
bonds, is not too tight to be borne, and superimposes on it a painful
burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary
affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid of by
making relatives as independent of one another as possible.
The Fate of the Family
The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as confusing
discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable
institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from
religion to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: And cast overboard of their plenty; and lo! at the Tevas feet
The surf on all of the beaches tumbled treasures of meat.
In the salt of the sea, a harvest tossed with the refluent foam;
And the children gleaned it in playing, and ate and carried it home;
And the elders stared and debated, and wondered and passed the jest,
But whenever a guest came by eagerly questioned the guest;
And little by little, from one to another, the word went round:
"In all the borders of Paea the victual rots on the ground,
And swine are plenty as rats. And now, when they fare to the sea,
The men of the Namunu-ura glean from under the tree
And load the canoe to the gunwale with all that is toothsome to eat;
Ballads |
