| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: grew thickly in the gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the
shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir-wood were plastered
here and there upon both sides, and here and there were cultivated
fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in
Gevaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys being
made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready built in
Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The
desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn
the sonnet into PATOIS: 'Mountains and vales and floods, heard YE
that whistle?'
At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: having alarmed all the women on that side of the water, he
went over to Ratcliff, and got access to some of the ladies
there; but though the young women there too were, according
to the fate of the day, pretty willing to be asked, yet such was
his ill-luck, that his character followed him over the water and
his good name was much the same there as it was on our side;
so that though he might have had wives enough, yet it did not
happen among the women that had good fortunes, which was
what he wanted.
But this was not all; she very ingeniously managed another
thing herself, for she got a young gentleman, who as a relation,
Moll Flanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: But King Cadmus, lest there should be too much of the dragon's
tooth in his children's disposition, used to find time from his
kingly duties to teach them their A B C--which he invented for
their benefit, and for which many little people, I am afraid,
are not half so grateful to him as they ought to be.
CIRCE'S PALACE.
Some of you have heard, no doubt, of the wise King Ulysses, and
how he went to the siege of Troy, and how, after that famous
city was taken and burned, he spent ten long years in trying to
get back again to his own little kingdom of Ithaca. At one time
in the course of this weary voyage, he arrived at an island
Tanglewood Tales |
