| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: eight-and-twenty. Youth mitigated the graceless effect which her
likeness to her mother sometimes gave to her features, but maternal
austerity had endowed her with two great qualities which made up for
everything. She was patient and gentle. Mademoiselle Augustine, who
was but just eighteen, was not like either her father or her mother.
She was one of those daughters whose total absence of any physical
affinity with their parents makes one believe in the adage: "God gives
children." Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly,
delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the world could
have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain meanness of
gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of ease. Her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: she would bear up with fortitude under this misfortune.
Bad indeed must the nature of Marianne's affliction be,
when her mother could talk of fortitude! mortifying
and humiliating must be the origin of those regrets,
which SHE could wish her not to indulge!
Against the interest of her own individual comfort,
Mrs. Dashwood had determined that it would be better for
Marianne to be any where, at that time, than at Barton,
where every thing within her view would be bringing back
the past in the strongest and most afflicting manner,
by constantly placing Willoughby before her, such as
Sense and Sensibility |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: bones and flesh, but in the growth and enlightenment of the mind. Hence
there must be 'a marriage of true minds' as well as of bodies, of
imagination and reason as well as of lusts and instincts. Men and women
without feeling or imagination are justly called brutes; yet Plato takes
away these qualities and puts nothing in their place, not even the desire
of a noble offspring, since parents are not to know their own children.
The most important transaction of social life, he who is the idealist
philosopher converts into the most brutal. For the pair are to have no
relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their children
are not theirs, but the state's; nor is any tie of affection to unite them.
Yet here the analogy of the animals might have saved Plato from a gigantic
The Republic |
