| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: late, so much so indeed that the number of dealers has increased
tenfold during the last twenty years in this city of Paris, whither
all the curiosities in the world come to rub against one another. And
for pictures there are but three marts in the world--Rome, London, and
Paris.
Elie Magus lived in the Chausee des Minimes, a short, broad street
leading to the Place Royale. He had bought the house, an old-fashioned
mansion, for a song, as the saying is, in 1831. Yet there were
sumptuous apartments within it, decorated in the time of Louis XV.;
for it had once been the Hotel Maulaincourt, built by the great
President of the Cour des Aides, and its remote position had saved it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: fallen and bled. From that spot there was
another trail, heavier than the first, where she
must have dragged herself back to Emil's body.
Once there, she seemed not to have struggled
any more. She had lifted her head to her lover's
breast, taken his hand in both her own, and
bled quietly to death. She was lying on her
right side in an easy and natural position, her
cheek on Emil's shoulder. On her face there was
a look of ineffable content. Her lips were parted
a little; her eyes were lightly closed, as if in a
O Pioneers! |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: other even more painful than the one of which I was
relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to
abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them
in no other light than a band of successful robbers,
who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and
stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land
reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the
meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I
read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very
discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted
would follow my learning to read had already come,
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
