| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: unburden the oppressed and swollen heart. Before this time, at
Wellwood House and here, when suffering from home-sick melancholy,
I had sought relief twice or thrice at this secret source of
consolation; and now I flew to it again, with greater avidity than
ever, because I seemed to need it more. I still preserve those
relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness
set up in travelling through the vale of life, to mark particular
occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the
country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me
how all things were when it was reared. Lest the reader should be
curious to see any of these effusions, I will favour him with one
Agnes Grey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: "I love Art," said the former bottle-dealer.
When Madame Vervelle's portrait was begun that of her husband was
nearly finished, and the enthusiasm of the family knew no bounds. The
notary had spoken in the highest praise of the painter. Pierre Grassou
was, he said, one of the most honest fellows on earth; he had laid by
thirty-six thousand francs; his days of poverty were over; he now
saved about ten thousand francs a year and capitalized the interest;
in short, he was incapable of making a woman unhappy. This last remark
had enormous weight in the scales. Vervelle's friends now heard of
nothing but the celebrated painter Fougeres.
The day on which Fougeres began the portrait of Mademoiselle Virginie,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: each other, no Being or reality can be ascribed to Not-being, and therefore
not to falsehood, which is the image or expression of Not-being. Falsehood
is wholly false; and to speak of true falsehood, as Theaetetus does
(Theaet.), is a contradiction in terms. The fallacy to us is ridiculous
and transparent,--no better than those which Plato satirizes in the
Euthydemus. It is a confusion of falsehood and negation, from which Plato
himself is not entirely free. Instead of saying, 'This is not in
accordance with facts,' 'This is proved by experience to be false,' and
from such examples forming a general notion of falsehood, the mind of the
Greek thinker was lost in the mazes of the Eleatic philosophy. And the
greater importance which Plato attributes to this fallacy, compared with
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