| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: uninteresting family. The number of cashiers in Paris must always be a
problem for the physiologist. Has any one as yet been able to state
correctly the terms of the proportion sum wherein the cashier figures
as the unknown X? Where will you find the man who shall live with
wealth, like a cat with a caged mouse? This man, for further
qualification, shall be capable of sitting boxed in behind an iron
grating for seven or eight hours a day during seven-eighths of the
year, perched upon a cane-seated chair in a space as narrow as a
lieutenant's cabin on board a man-of-war. Such a man must be able to
defy anchylosis of the knee and thigh joints; he must have a soul
above meanness, in order to live meanly; must lose all relish for
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: spectacle of a whole life in which you have no part paralyses
personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. The
baker stands in his door; the colonel with his three medals goes by
to the CAFE at night; the troops drum and trumpet and man the
ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It would task language to say
how placidly you behold all this. In a place where you have taken
some root, you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a
hand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But in
a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so
large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far
apart from the business, that you positively forget it would be
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: to the sixth sense of their listener. Do I make myself
quite clear?"
"You do not, Perry," I replied. He shook his head
in despair, and returned to his work. They had set us
to carrying a great accumulation of Maharan literature
from one apartment to another, and there arranging it
upon shelves. I suggested to Perry that we were in the
public library of Phutra, but later, as he commenced
to discover the key to their written language, he assured
me that we were handling the ancient archives of the race.
During this period my thoughts were continually upon
At the Earth's Core |
