| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: murmur sadly: "If only Masha had been with us! If only Masha had
not died!"
In order to explain the relations between Masha and my father
I must turn back a considerable way. There was one distinguishing
and, at first sight, peculiar trait in my father's character, due
perhaps to the fact that he grew up without a mother, and that was
that all exhibitions of tenderness were entirely foreign to him.
I say "tenderness" in contradistinction to heartiness.
Heartiness he had and in a very high degree.
His description of the death of my Uncle Nikolái is
characteristic in this connection. In a letter to his other
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: Highlanders. I was not only discontented with my lodging, but
with myself for my mismanagement of Neil, and thought I could
hardly be worse off. But very wrongly, as I was soon to see; for
I had not been half an hour at the inn (standing in the door most
of the time, to ease my eyes from the peat smoke) when a
thunderstorm came close by, the springs broke in a little hill on
which the inn stood, and one end of the house became a running
water. Places of public entertainment were bad enough all over
Scotland in those days; yet it was a wonder to myself, when I had
to go from the fireside to the bed in which I slept, wading over
the shoes.
Kidnapped |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: species.
I will not hesitate, however, to avow my belief that it has been my
singular good fortune to have very early in life fallen in with certain
tracks which have conducted me to considerations and maxims, of which I
have formed a method that gives me the means, as I think, of gradually
augmenting my knowledge, and of raising it by little and little to the
highest point which the mediocrity of my talents and the brief duration of
my life will permit me to reach. For I have already reaped from it such
fruits that, although I have been accustomed to think lowly enough of
myself, and although when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the
varied courses and pursuits of mankind at large, I find scarcely one which
Reason Discourse |
