| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: must be content either to lose his gift or to live without a heart.
You are slender and fragile, you will give way," he added, as he
turned into the restaurant.
Lucien returned home, thinking over that terrible verdict. He beheld
the life of literature by the light of the profound truths uttered by
Vignon.
"Money! money!" a voice cried in his ears.
Then he drew three bills of a thousand francs each, due respectively
in one, two, and three months, imitating the handwriting of his
brother-in-law, David Sechard, with admirable skill. He endorsed the
bills, and took them next morning to Metivier, the paper-dealer in the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: past. They do so to-day. And no matter how wise are our
physicians and bacteriologists, no matter how successfully they
cope with these invaders, new invaders continue to arise--new
drifts of hungry life seeking to devour us. And so we are
justified in believing that in the saturated populations of the
future, when life is suffocating in the pressure against
subsistence, that new, and ever new, hosts of destroying micro-
organisms will continue to arise and fling themselves upon earth-
crowded man to give him room. There may even be plagues of
unprecedented ferocity that will depopulate great areas before the
wit of man can overcome them. And this we know: that no matter
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: extinction, for they are generally represented by extremely few species;
and such species as do occur are generally very distinct from each other,
which again implies extinction. The genera Ornithorhynchus and
Lepidosiren, for example, would not have been less aberrant had each been
represented by a dozen species instead of by a single one; but such
richness in species, as I find after some investigation, does not commonly
fall to the lot of aberrant genera. We can, I think, account for this fact
only by looking at aberrant forms as failing groups conquered by more
successful competitors, with a few members preserved by some unusual
coincidence of favourable circumstances.
Mr. Waterhouse has remarked that, when a member belonging to one group of
On the Origin of Species |
