| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: that immense crowd which swarms and lives even when it sleeps.
Ah! the sleeping of others is more painful still than their
conversation. And I can never find repose when I know and feel
that on the other side of a wall several existences are
undergoing these regular eclipses of reason.
Why am I thus? Who knows? The cause of it is very simple perhaps.
I get tired very soon of everything that does not emanate from
me. And there are many people in similar case.
We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of
others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses,
pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: offence to the unmetaphysical part of mankind, we may speak of it as due to
the imperfection of language or the limitation of human faculties. It is
nevertheless a discovery which, in Platonic language, may be termed a 'most
gracious aid to thought.'
The doctrine of opposite moments of thought or of progression by
antagonism, further assists us in framing a scheme or system of the
sciences. The negation of one gives birth to another of them. The double
notions are the joints which hold them together. The simple is developed
into the complex, the complex returns again into the simple. Beginning
with the highest notion of mind or thought, we may descend by a series of
negations to the first generalizations of sense. Or again we may begin
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: "Maggie's gone teh deh devil! Are yehs deaf?" roared Jimmie,
impatiently.
"Deh hell she has," murmured the mother, astounded.
Jimmie grunted, and then began to stare out at the window.
His mother sat down in a chair, but a moment later sprang erect and
delivered a maddened whirl of oaths. Her son turned to look at her
as she reeled and swayed in the middle of the room, her fierce face
convulsed with passion, her blotched arms raised high in imprecation.
"May Gawd curse her forever," she shrieked. "May she eat
nothin' but stones and deh dirt in deh street. May she sleep in
deh gutter an' never see deh sun shine agin. Deh damn--"
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
