| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in
submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers,
the transaction had dropped out of his consciousness into that
unvisited limbo to which we relegate the deeds we would rather not
have done but have no notion of undoing. From the moment he had
obtained Miss Trent's promise not to sail with her aunt he had
tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After that, he
argued, his first duty was to her--she had become his conscience.
The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's adroit
manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful
venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard's
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: barricades. Perhaps he had not thought it advisable to reveal
himself to her; but he revealed himself to me, and inspired me
with terror.
"A prophet? Oh! yes. He thought himself an Attila, and foresaw
the consequences of his revolution; it was not only from instinct
but also from theory that he urged a nation on to Nihilism. The
phrase is not his, but Turgenieff's, I believe, but the idea
certainly belonged to him. He got his programme of agricultural
communism from Herzen, and his destructive radicalism from
Pougatcheff, but he did not stop there. I mean that he went on to
evil for the sake of evil. Herzen wished for the happiness of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: debauched man will dissipate his talent, that a drunkard will waste it
in libations; while, on the other hand, no man can give himself talent
by wholesome living: nevertheless, it is all but proved that Virgil,
the painter of love, never loved a Dido, and that Rousseau, the model
citizen, had enough pride to had furnished forth an aristocracy. On
the other hand Raphael and Michael Angelo do present the glorious
conjunction of genius with the lines of character. Talent in men is
therefore, in all moral points, very much what beauty is in women,--
simply a promise. Let us, therefore, doubly admire the man in whom
both heart and character equal the perfection of his genius.
When Ernest discovered within his poet an ambitious egoist, the worst
Modeste Mignon |
