| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: buildings contributed to public ornament, the difficulty of reaching high
perfection with but the materials of others to operate on, will be readily
acknowledged. In the same way I fancied that those nations which, starting
from a semi-barbarous state and advancing to civilization by slow degrees,
have had their laws successively determined, and, as it were, forced upon
them simply by experience of the hurtfulness of particular crimes and
disputes, would by this process come to be possessed of less perfect
institutions than those which, from the commencement of their association
as communities, have followed the appointments of some wise legislator. It
is thus quite certain that the constitution of the true religion, the
ordinances of which are derived from God, must be incomparably superior to
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim of a
dissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no more
to blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners by
good manners, he was to be deprived of the one complete
companionship he had ever known ....
His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in
New York after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last
articles, his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least
boring way of disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck
of going, reluctantly and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday
with the poor Nat Fulmers, in the wilds of New Hampshire, and of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: by forty years than it is at present. Travellers did not often carry
full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets;
and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the
flower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase
due to the painter's fancy. Romanticism, which has helped to fill
some dull blanks with love and knowledge, had not yet penetrated
the times with its leaven and entered into everybody's food; it was
fermenting still as a distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain
long-haired German artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who
worked or idled near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.
One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long,
Middlemarch |
