| 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: that it may be called impossible in very young girls, was that her
hands, incomparably fine in shape, were as soft, transparent, and
white as those of a woman after the birth of her second child. She had
exactly the hair and the foot for which the Duchesse de Berri was so
famous, hair so thick that no hairdresser could gather it into his
hand, and so long that it fell to the ground in rings; for Esther was
of that medium height which makes a woman a sort of toy, to be taken
up and set down, taken up again and carried without fatigue. Her skin,
as fine as rice-paper, of a warm amber hue showing the purple veins,
was satiny without dryness, soft without being clammy.
Esther, excessively strong though apparently fragile, arrested
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: my remedy for this one individual Kingdom of Ireland, and for no
other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon Earth.
Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing
our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither
cloaths, nor houshold furniture, except what is of our own growth
and manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the materials and
instruments that promote foreign luxury: Of curing the
expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gaming in our
women: Of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and
temperance: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ
even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of
A Modest Proposal |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: to love her by desires for material happiness, by the hope, long
indulged, of gilding with comfort his mother's last years, by eager
longing for the ease of life so needful to men who live by thought;
but this most innocent point of departure degraded his passion in his
own eyes. Moreover, he feared the ridicule the world would cast upon
the love of a young man of twenty-three for an old maid of forty.
And yet his passion was real; whatever may seem false about such a
love elsewhere, it can be realized as a fact in the provinces, where,
manners and morals being without change or chance or movement or
mystery, marriage becomes a necessity of life. No family will accept a
young man of dissolute habits. However natural the liaison of a young
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