| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: than take leave of my dear, cozy Paris----"
"Will you not come to Italy, to Naples, and lead a pleasant life
there--a delicious, luxurious life, with this stout old fogy of yours,
who puffs and blows like a seal?"
"No."
"Ungrateful girl!"
"Ungrateful?" she cried, rising to her feet. "I might leave this house
this moment and take nothing out of it but myself. I shall have given
you all the treasures a young girl can give, and something that not
every drop in your veins and mine can ever give me back. If, by any
means whatever, by selling my hopes of eternity, for instance, I could
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: children. A trifling predilection for the real thing in sonships is
absolutely vital, even to the continuance of the artificial variety.
For if one generation ever went in exclusively for adoption, there
would be no subsequent generation to adopt.
As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of
society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
greater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead
without the necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he
can cease to live while still practically existing; for it is always
open to the head of a family to abdicate.
The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: before I was half through!--it is all that saved him
from exploding--and my dreams of an Honorary Fellowship,
gold medals, and a niche in the Hall of Fame faded into
the thin, cold air of his arctic atmosphere.
But I believe the story, and so would you, and so would
the learned Fellow of the Royal Geological Society, had you
and he heard it from the lips of the man who told it to me.
Had you seen, as I did, the fire of truth in those gray eyes;
had you felt the ring of sincerity in that quiet voice;
had you realized the pathos of it all--you, too, would believe.
You would not have needed the final ocular proof that I
At the Earth's Core |
