| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: maroon coat, and has a place reserved for him in several boxes at the
"Bouffons." He is sometimes confounded with the Parasite; but he has
filled too many real functions to be thought a sponger; moreover he
possesses a small estate in a certain department, the name of which he
has never been known to utter.
"Madame Firmiani? why, my dear fellow, she was Murat's former
mistress." This man belongs to the Contradictors,--persons who note
errata in memoirs, rectify dates, correct facts, bet a hundred to one,
and are certain about everything. You can easily detect them in some
gross blunder in the course of a single evening. They will tell you
they were in Paris at the time of Mallet's conspiracy, forgetting that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: 1. Outside Chance; 2. Also Ran; 3. Dotty's Trotter; 4. Sure Win; 5.
High Risk; 6. Looking Good; 7. King Alphonso.
While the girl burst into unrestrained sobbing, the boy, feeling the
full difficulty of the conflict between youth and manhood, choked
his tears back, and knowing his father to be a philosophical type,
tried to see the metaphorical application of this event. "This race
is an allegory, isn't it, Father?" he asked, "where we learn that to
succeed we must avoid what appears to be a 'Sure Win' and apply
ourselves instead to the 'Outside Chance.'"
"No, my boy," the man answered. "The lesson is that we should not
pay attention to names and appearances, but that we should penetrate
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go
about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I
should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop
when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star
of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,
peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing
his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that
no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile
too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or
rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about
Walden |
