| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: tude," I answered, not having, in fact, any good
deed upon my conscience.
"What? But yesterday! Have you for-
gotten? . . . Mary has told me everything" . . .
"Why! Have you everything in common so
soon as this? Even gratitude?" . . .
"Listen," said Grushnitski very earnestly;
"pray do not make fun of my love, if you wish to
remain my friend. . . You see, I love her to
the point of madness . . . and I think -- I
hope -- she loves me too. . . I have a request to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: sorry for these girls, who were living and would end their lives
in the wilds, in a province far away from the center of culture,
where nothing is accidental, but everything is in accordance with
reason and law, and where, for instance, every suicide is
intelligible, so that one can explain why it has happened and
what is its significance in the general scheme of things. He
imagined that if the life surrounding him here in the wilds were
not intelligible to him, and if he did not see it, it meant that
it did not exist at all.
At supper the conversation turned on Lesnitsky
"He left a wife and child," said Startchenko. "I would forbid
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: the senses to inferior beings, was to great souls the most immense of
all moral creations and the most binding. To justify d'Arthez, he
instanced the example of Raffaele and the Fornarina. He might have
offered himself as an instance for this theory, he who had seen an
angel in the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. This strange fancy of d'Arthez
might, however, be explained in other ways; perhaps he had despaired
of meeting here below with a woman who answered to that delightful
vision which all men of intellect dream of and cherish; perhaps his
heart was too sensitive, too delicate, to yield itself to a woman of
society; perhaps he thought best to let nature have her way, and keep
his illusions by cultivating his ideal; perhaps he had laid aside love
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