| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: These hidden matters, carefully concealed by all concerned, were
destined to fall in their results like an avalanche on Pierrette. Such
mysterious things, which we ought perhaps to call the putrescence of
the human heart, lie at the base of the greatest revolutions,
political, social or domestic; but in telling of them it is desirable
to explain that their subtle significance cannot be given in a matter-
of-fact narrative. These secret schemes and calculations do not show
themselves as brutally and undisguisedly while taking place as they
must when the history of them is related. To set down in writing the
circumlocutions, oratorical precautions, protracted conversations, and
honeyed words glossed over the venom of intentions, would make as long
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: out on the garden behind the house. At the moment Madame d'Espard was
seated in one of the old rococo armchairs of which Madame had set the
fashion. Rastignac was at her left hand on a low chair, in which he
looked settled like an Italian lady's "cousin." A third person was
standing by the corner of the chimney-piece. As the shrewd doctor had
suspected, the Marquise was a woman of a parched and wiry
constitution. But for her regimen her complexion must have taken the
ruddy tone that is produced by constant heat; but she added to the
effect of her acquired pallor by the strong colors of the stuffs she
hung her rooms with, or in which she dressed. Reddish-brown, marone,
bistre with a golden light in it, suited her to perfection. Her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: organs of any kind--vertebrae in the one case and legs in the other--have
actually been modified into skulls or jaws. Yet so strong is the
appearance of a modification of this nature having occurred, that
naturalists can hardly avoid employing language having this plain
signification. On my view these terms may be used literally; and the
wonderful fact of the jaws, for instance, of a crab retaining numerous
characters, which they would probably have retained through inheritance, if
they had really been metamorphosed during a long course of descent from
true legs, or from some simple appendage, is explained.
Embryology. -- It has already been casually remarked that certain organs in
the individual, which when mature become widely different and serve for
On the Origin of Species |
