| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: theological controversy. The professor's chair was the tribune of the
period.
This system lasted till the day when Rabelais gibbeted dialectics by
his merciless satire, as Cervantes demolished chivalry by a narrative
comedy.
To understand this amazing period and the spirit which dictated its
voluminous, though now forgotten, masterpieces, to analyze it, even to
its barbarisms, we need only examine the Constitutions of the
University of Paris and the extraordinary scheme of instruction that
then obtained. Theology was taught under two faculties--that of
Theology properly so called, and that of Canon Law. The faculty of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: All made a magic symphony; but when
I thought upon the coming of hard men
To cut those patriarchal trees away,
And turn to gold the silver of that spray,
I shuddered. Yet a gladness now and then
Did wake me to myself till I was glad
In earnest, and was welcoming the time
For screaming saws to sound above the chime
Of idle waters, and for me to know
The jealous visionings that I had had
Were steps to the great place where trees and torrents go.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: thinking, too, that this poor fellow had been a dead body, as the other
was, and laid there by some of the neighbours.
Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and the cart came
along, finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up
with the instrument they used and threw them into the cart, and, all
this while the piper slept soundly.
From hence they passed along and took in other dead bodies, till, as
honest John Hayward told me, they almost buried him alive in the
cart; yet all this while he slept soundly. At length the cart came to the
place where the bodies were to be thrown into the ground, which, as I
do remember, was at Mount Mill; and as the cart usually stopped
A Journal of the Plague Year |
