| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: was too thoroughly kind by nature to worry deliberately the woman he
loved; on the contrary, he kept her in the bluest and least cloudy
heaven of love. The problem of eternal beatitude is one of those whose
solution is known only to God. Here, below, the sublimest poets have
simply harassed their readers when attempting to picture paradise.
Dante's reef was that of Vandenesse; all honor to such courage!
Felix's wife began to find monotony in an Eden so well arranged; the
perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial
paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made
the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the
fold. Such, judging by the history of ages, appears to be the meaning
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: At the end of the first basin the man had risen to serenity;
at the second he was jovial; at the third, argumentative, at
the fourth, the qualities signified by the shape of his
face, the occasional clench of his mouth, and the fiery
spark of his dark eye, began to tell in his conduct; he was
overbearing--even brilliantly quarrelsome.
The conversation took a high turn, as it often does on such
occasions. The ruin of good men by bad wives, and, more
particularly, the frustration of many a promising youth's
high aims and hopes and the extinction of his energies by an
early imprudent marriage, was the theme.
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: For often fineness compensated size:
Besides the brain was like the hand, and grew
With using; thence the man's, if more was more;
He took advantage of his strength to be
First in the field: some ages had been lost;
But woman ripened earlier, and her life
Was longer; and albeit their glorious names
Were fewer, scattered stars, yet since in truth
The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,
Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,
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