| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with
a swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip
II. were but clumsy and impotent.
All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as
far as they are in the hands of good men or of bad.
Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs,
instead of inaugurating an era of progress, may possibly only retard
it. "Rester sur un grand succes," which was Rossini's advice to a
young singer who had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which the world
often follows, not only from prudence, but from necessity. They
have done so much that it seems neither prudent nor possible to do
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: undistinguishable from the soil and moving on a hinge, than is the
Clotho in her tent, which is inviolable by any enemy ignorant of
the device. The Clotho, when in danger, runs quickly home; she
opens the chink with a touch of her claw, enters and disappears.
The door closes of itself and is supplied, in case of need, with a
lock consisting of a few threads. No burglar, led astray by the
multiplicity of arches, one and all alike, will ever discover how
the fugitive vanished so suddenly.
While the Clotho displays a more simple ingenuity as regards her
defensive machinery, she is incomparably ahead of the Mygale in the
matter of domestic comfort. Let us open her cabin. What luxury!
The Life of the Spider |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: Trinidad and the Judge, bearing the marks of protracted travel,
entered, conducting between them a single impish boy, who stared with
sullen, pessimistic eyes at the gaudy tree.
"Where are the other children?" asked the assayer's wife, the
acknowledged leader of all social functions.
"Ma'am," said Trinidad with a sigh, "prospectin' for kids at Christmas
time is like huntin' in a limestone for silver. This parental business
is one that I haven't no chance to comprehend. It seems that fathers
and mothers are willin' for their offsprings to be drownded, stole,
fed on poison oak, and et by catamounts 364 days in the year; but on
Christmas Day they insists on enjoyin' the exclusive mortification of
Heart of the West |
