| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: up at the mother's call and scurry towards the plate of rice.
Habit has made us indifferent to the spectacle of those pretty
little animal machines, which work so nimbly and with such
precision; we pay no attention, so simple does it all appear to us.
Science examines and looks at things differently. She says to
herself:
'Nothing is made with nothing. The chick feeds itself; it consumes
or rather it assimilates and turns the food into heat, which is
converted into energy.'
Were any one to tell us of a chick which, for seven or eight months
on end, kept itself in condition for running, always fit, always
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of
chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on.
It's all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they
humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's
houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my
children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and
magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who
has come to this as I have through the same sufferings..."
Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or
not Moscow was taken as Smolensk had been, was suddenly checked in his
speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a
War and Peace |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: do not hesitate to exact."
"About Malaga?" said Thaddeus, with bitterness in his heart.
"Well, yes," she said; "if you wish to end your days in this house and
continue good friends with us, you must give her up. How an old
soldier--"
"I am only thirty-five, and haven't a white hair."
"You look old," she said, "and that's the same thing. How so careful a
manager, so distinguished a--"
The horrible part of all this was her evident intention to rouse a
sense of honor in his soul which she thought extinct.
"--so distinguished a man as you are, Thaddeus," she resumed after a
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