| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: each one forget his own interests, his personal conceit, or, if you
like, his pretensions.
At about two in the morning, as supper ended, no one was left sitting
round the table but intimate friends, proved by intercourse of fifteen
years, and some persons of great taste and good breeding, who knew the
world. By tacit agreement, perfectly carried out, at supper every one
renounced his pretensions to importance. Perfect equality set the
tone. But indeed there was no one present who was not very proud of
being himself.
Mademoiselle des Touches always insists on her guests remaining at
table till they leave, having frequently remarked the change which a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: present is produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it
under a heap of sentimental lies and false pretences.
Childhood as a State of Sin
Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more
sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat
childhood frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the
monstrous principle that little children should be seen and not heard,
and to enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make
cohabitation with children as convenient as possible for adults
without the smallest regard for the interests, either remote or
immediate, of the children. This system tends to produce a tough,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: raised from the top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a
fyne clock. There be four lanes which pass from the principall
street; one is called the Black Vennel, which is steep, declining to
the south-west, and leads to a lower street, which is far larger than
the high chiefe street, and it runs from the Kirkland to the Well
Trees, in which there have been many pretty buildings, belonging to
the severall gentry of the countrey, who were wont to resort thither
in winter, and divert themselves in converse together at their owne
houses. It was once the principall street of the town; but many of
these houses of the gentry having been decayed and ruined, it has
lost much of its ancient beautie. Just opposite to this vennel,
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