| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: itself upon its mechanical inventions, perfect this essential
portion of the social machinery?
If the author has preserved the old-fashioned style of address To
the Reader before a work wherein he endeavors to represent all
literary forms, it is for the purpose of making a remark that
applies to several of the Studies, and very specially to this.
Every one of his compositions has been based upon ideas more or
less novel, which, as it seemed to him, needed literary
expression; he can claim priority for certain forms and for
certain ideas which have since passed into the domain of
literature, and have there, in some instances, become common
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: carry him."
"Pass, Lawless," said the sentry.
"And where is John?" asked the Grey Friar.
"He holdeth a court, by the mass, and taketh rents as to the manner
born!" cried another of the company.
So it proved. When Lawless got as far up the village as the little
inn, he found Ellis Duckworth surrounded by Sir Daniel's tenants,
and, by the right of his good company of archers, coolly taking
rents, and giving written receipts in return for them. By the
faces of the tenants, it was plain how little this proceeding
pleased them; for they argued very rightly that they would simply
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service
the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their
costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and
with such borrowed language Thus did Luther masquerade as the Apostle
Paul; thus did the revolution of 1789-1814 drape itself alternately as
Roman Republic and as Roman Empire; nor did the revolution of 1818 know
what better to do than to parody at one time the year 1789, at another
the revolutionary traditions of 1793-95 Thus does the beginner, who has
acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother
tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is
able freely to express himself therewith when he moves in it without
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