| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: wells and fled to the hill-summits. We fought with the Magadae who
are born old, and grow younger and younger every year, and die when
they are little children; and with the Laktroi who say that they
are the sons of tigers, and paint themselves yellow and black; and
with the Aurantes who bury their dead on the tops of trees, and
themselves live in dark caverns lest the Sun, who is their god,
should slay them; and with the Krimnians who worship a crocodile,
and give it earrings of green glass, and feed it with butter and
fresh fowls; and with the Agazonbae, who are dog-faced; and with
the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly than
horses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: thought; there are portraits which require the infusion of a soul, and
mean nothing unless the subtlest expression of the speaking
countenance is given; furthermore, there are things which we know not
how to say or do without the aid of secret harmonies which a day, an
hour, a fortunate conjunction of celestial signs, or an inward moral
tendency may produce.
Such mysterious revelations are imperatively needed in order to tell
this simple history, in which we seek to interest those souls that are
naturally grave and reflective and find their sustenance in tender
emotions. If the writer, like the surgeon beside his dying friend, is
filled with a species of reverence for the subject he is handling,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: of lover and avoid the other, and therefore encourages some to pursue, and
others to fly; testing both the lover and beloved in contests and trials,
until they show to which of the two classes they respectively belong. And
this is the reason why, in the first place, a hasty attachment is held to
be dishonourable, because time is the true test of this as of most other
things; and secondly there is a dishonour in being overcome by the love of
money, or of wealth, or of political power, whether a man is frightened
into surrender by the loss of them, or, having experienced the benefits of
money and political corruption, is unable to rise above the seductions of
them. For none of these things are of a permanent or lasting nature; not
to mention that no generous friendship ever sprang from them. There
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