| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: the heights of the stage of the Opera. With more beauty than
education, a mediocre dancer with rather more sense than most of her
class, she took no part in the virtuous reforms which ruined the corps
de ballet; she continued the Guimard dynasty. She owed her ascendency,
moreover, to various well-known protectors, to the Duc de Rhetore (the
Due de Chaulieu's eldest son), to the influence of a famous
Superintendent of Fine Arts, and sundry diplomatists and rich
foreigners. During her apogee she had a neat little house in the Rue
Chauchat, and lived as Opera nymphs used to live in the old days. Du
Bruel was smitten with her about the time when the Duke's fancy came
to an end in 1823. Being a mere subordinate in the Civil Service, du
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: into the academy, was an operation to reduce human excrement to
its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the
tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour
exhale, and scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance,
from the society, of a vessel filled with human ordure, about the
bigness of a Bristol barrel.
I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder; who likewise
showed me a treatise he had written concerning the malleability
of fire, which he intended to publish.
There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new
method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working
Gulliver's Travels |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: cried, "if the story were a thousand times true, can't you see you
are a million times a lower ----- for daring to repeat it?" I wish
it could be told of you that when the report reached you in your
house, perhaps after family worship, you had found in your soul
enough holy anger to receive it with the same expressions; ay, even
with that one which I dare not print; it would not need to have
been blotted away, like Uncle Toby's oath, by the tears of the
recording angel; it would have been counted to you for your
brightest righteousness. But you have deliberately chosen the part
of the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with improvements
of your own. The man from Honolulu - miserable, leering creature -
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