| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: ground (to which the idiots had no proper title) into allotments which
were needed in the township.
"All the rich were on my side; but the poor, the old women, the
children, and a few pig-headed people were violently opposed to me.
Unluckily it so fell out that my last removal had not been completely
carried out. The cretin whom you have just seen, not having returned
to his house, had not been taken away, so that the next morning he was
the sole remaining example of his species in the village. There were
several families still living there; but though they were little
better than idiots, they were, at any rate, free from the taint of
cretinism. I determined to go through with my work, and came
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: canon became by force of nature a fine nonagenarian, snowy about the
head, with trembling hands, but square as a tower, having spat so much
without coughing, that he coughed now without being able to spit; no
longer rising from his chair, he who had so often risen for humanity;
but drinking dry, eating heartily, saying nothing, but having all the
appearance of a living Canon of Notre Dame. Seeing the immobility of
the aforesaid canon; seeing the stories of his evil life which for
some time had circulated among the common people, always ignorant;
seeing his dumb seclusion, his flourishing health, his young old age,
and other things too numerous to mention--there were certain people
who to do the marvellous and injure our holy religion, went about
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood were completely fulfilled.
The bonds that had held me to "old master" were broken. No man now
had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I was
in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with
the rest of its busy number. I have often been asked how I felt
when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything
in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer.
A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the
"quick round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year
of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words
can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after
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