| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: is done with a show of equity, because, forsooth, he is responsible
for her maintenance.
"The tender mother cannot _lawfully_ snatch from the gripe of
the gambling spendthrift, or beastly drunkard, unmindful of his
offspring, the fortune which falls to her by chance; or (so flagrant
is the injustice) what she earns by her own exertions. No; he can
rob her with impunity, even to waste publicly on a courtezan; and
the laws of her country--if women have a country--afford her no
protection or redress from the oppressor, unless she have the plea
of bodily fear; yet how many ways are there of goading the soul
almost to madness, equally unmanly, though not so mean? When such
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: "Because you are wise and powerful, and no one else can help me,"
answered the Scarecrow.
"I never grant favors without some return," said Oz; "but this
much I will promise. If you will kill for me the Wicked Witch of
the West, I will bestow upon you a great many brains, and such
good brains that you will be the wisest man in all the Land of Oz."
"I thought you asked Dorothy to kill the Witch," said the Scarecrow,
in surprise.
"So I did. I don't care who kills her. But until she is dead
I will not grant your wish. Now go, and do not seek me again
until you have earned the brains you so greatly desire."
The Wizard of Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the
sportsman's despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike
dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are
often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of
this overwhelming labor, "I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it
with regret." Be it known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does
not throw himself into his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a
soldier leads a forlorn hope without a moment's thought, and if when
he is in the crater he does not dig on as a miner does when the earth
has fallen in on him; if he contemplates the difficulties before him
instead of conquering them one by one, like the lovers in fairy tales,
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