| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: quite clear on a few points myself. I am going to take
an entirely new course."
"I am astonished, Clym. How can you want to do better
than you've been doing?"
"Very easily. But I shall not do better in the way
you mean; I suppose it will be called doing worse.
But I hate that business of mine, and I want to do some
worthy thing before I die. As a schoolmaster I think
to do it--a school-master to the poor and ignorant,
to teach them what nobody else will."
"After all the trouble that has been taken to give you
 Return of the Native |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: incomprehensible philosophical lingo. His success was complete.
If young Monsieur de Soulas did not fall in the esteem of Besancon
society, it was out of pure vanity on its part; the aristocracy were
happy to affect a modern air, and to be able to show any Parisians of
rank who visited the Comte a young man who bore some likeness to them.
All this hidden labor, all this dust thrown in people's eyes, this
display of folly and latent prudence, had an object, or the /lion/ of
Besancon would have been no son of the soil. Amedee wanted to achieve
a good marriage by proving some day that his farms were not mortgaged,
and that he had some savings. He wanted to be the talk of the town, to
be the finest and best-dressed man there, in order to win first the
 Albert Savarus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: integrity, greatly respected, and for whom Madame de Dey had shown
much esteem. There all the aspirants for the hand of the rich widow
had a tale to tell that was more or less probable; and each expected
to turn to his own profit the secret event which he thus recounted.
The public prosecutor imagined a whole drama to result in the return
by night of Madame de Dey's son, the emigre. The mayor was convinced
that a priest who refused the oath had arrived from La Vendee and
asked for asylum; but the day being Friday, the purchase of a hare
embarrassed the good mayor not a little. The judge of the district
court held firmly to the theory of a Chouan leader or a body of
Vendeans hotly pursued. Others were convinced that the person thus
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