| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: "You are talking as if it were a real love-letter, Naqui----"
"Well, am I not handsome enough to receive them?" she said, holding up
her forehead for a kiss. There was a carelessness in her manner that
would have told any man less blind than Castanier that it was only a
piece of conjugal duty, as it were, to give this joy to the cashier,
but use and wont had brought Castanier to the point where clear-
sightedness is no longer possible for love.
"I have taken a box at the Gymnase this evening," he said; "let us
have dinner early, and then we need not dine in a hurry."
"Go and take Jenny. I am tired of plays. I do not know what is the
matter with me this evening; I would rather stay here by the fire."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: lingered saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars called
suddenly into vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for whom
it evidently had a fascination, often seated there in a maze or a
doze; but half the satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and
fitful worshipper was that he found the years of his life there,
and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the submissions, the
conquests, if there had been such, a record of that adventurous
journey in which the beginnings and the endings of human relations
are the lettered mile-stones. He had in general little taste for
the past as a part of his own history; at other times and in other
places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Apology by Xenophon: with my air; and then he said: 'To-morrow, Phaedo, I suppose that
these fair locks of yours will be severed.'"
It is also said that, seeing Anytus[55] pass by, Socrates remarked:
"How proudly the great man steps; he thinks, no doubt, he has
performed some great and noble deed in putting me to death, and all
because, seeing him deemed worthy of the highest honours of the state,
I told him it ill became him to bring up his so in a tan-yard.[56]
What a scamp the fellow is! he appears not to know that of us two
whichever has achieved what is best and noblest for all future time is
the real victor in this suit. Well! well!" he added, "Homer[57] has
ascribed to some at the point of death a power of forecasting things
The Apology |
