| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: round the end of it, put it into the hollow, made it firm, lit it, and
then sat down beside his wife, looking alternately at his friends, his
daughter, and the two candles. The Abbe Cruchot, a plump, puffy little
man, with a red wig plastered down and a face like an old female
gambler, said as he stretched out his feet, well shod in stout shoes
with silver buckles: "The des Grassins have not come?"
"Not yet," said Grandet.
"But are they coming?" asked the old notary, twisting his face, which
had as many holes as a collander, into a queer grimace.
"I think so," answered Madame Grandet.
"Are your vintages all finished?" said Monsieur de Bonfons to Grandet.
Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: Fredericksburg, on December 13, 1862.
"I have placed you," he wrote on giving General Hooker the
command, "at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I
have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons,
and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some
things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you. I
believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which, of course,
I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your
profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in
yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality.
You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent,
in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial.
Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of
a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stadium everywhere; it was carried
round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length. It
received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round
the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea. Further
inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from
it through the plain, and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea:
these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they
brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the
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