| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: beloved woman and himself. He was suddenly plunged into the deepest
distress of mind, for the thought gnawed him, "I have myself made her
despise me!" His own folly stared him in the face. Life then became a
burden to him, the very sun turned gray. And yet, amid all these
bitter thoughts, he found again some moments of pure joy. There were
times when he could give himself up wholly to his admiration for his
mistress, who paid not the slightest attention to him. Hanging about
in corners at her parties and receptions, silent, all heart and eyes,
he never lost one of her attitudes, nor a tone of her voice when she
sang. He lived in her life; he groomed the horse which SHE rode, he
studied the ways and means of that splendid establishment, to the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: work. This kind of parish-slaves was kept up in England
until far into the 19th century under the name of
``roundsmen.''[7]
[7] Vol. i, pp. 758, 759.
Page after page and chapter after chapter of
facts of this nature, each brought up to illustrate
some fatalistic theory which Marx professes to have
proved by exact reasoning, cannot but stir into fury
any passionate working-class reader, and into
unbearable shame any possessor of capital in whom
generosity and justice are not wholly extinct.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: which was not pedantic,--though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of
premature gravity. He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon
all who saw him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the flesh-
tints, though without color, and relieved by a small moustache and
imperial a la Mazarin. Without this evidence of virility he might have
resembled a young woman in disguise, so refined was the shape of his
face and the cut of his lips, so feminine the transparent ivory of a
set of teeth, regular enough to have seemed artificial. Add to these
womanly points a habit of speech as gentle as the expression of the
face; as gentle, too, as the blue eyes with their Turkish eyelids, and
you will readily understand how it was that the minister occasionally
Modeste Mignon |
