| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: at him with the troubled gravity of a child.
"You don't know how much I need such a friend," she said. "My
aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to
apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live
up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves.
And the other women--my best friends--well, they use me or abuse
me; but they don't care a straw what happens to me. I've been
about too long--people are getting tired of me; they are
beginning to say I ought to marry."
There was a moment's pause, during which Selden meditated one or
two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it
will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.
I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of
the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed,
twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one
fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep,
black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are
seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded
by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve
four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year
old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune,
A Modest Proposal |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: from the natural way the names of things and people--
mostly purely local--rose to her lips. If she knew little
of what they represented she knew still less of anything else.
Her aunt had drawn in--her failing interest in the table mats
and lampshades was a sign of that--and she had not been able
to mingle in society or to entertain it alone; so that the matter
of her reminiscences struck one as an old world altogether.
If she had not been so decent her references would have seemed
to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova.
I found myself falling into the error of thinking of her too
as one of Jeffrey Aspern's contemporaries; this came from her
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