| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: man has kept all his boyish beliefs, illusions, frankness, and
impetuosity into middle age, his first impulse is, as it were, to
stretch out a hand to take the thing that he desires; a little
later he realises that there is a gulf set between them, and that
it is all but impossible to cross it. A sort of childish
impatience seizes him, he wants the thing the more, and trembles
or cries. Wherefore, the next day, after the stormiest
reflections that had yet perturbed his mind, Armand de Montriveau
discovered that he was under the yoke of the senses, and his
bondage made the heavier by his love.
The woman so cavalierly treated in his thoughts of yesterday had
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: 'the firstborn of every creature.' Nor need we discuss at length how far
Plato agrees in the later Jewish idea of creation, according to which God
made the world out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as
something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover in the
Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described, even more
explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act, but as a work or
process which occupied six days. There is a chaos in both, and it would be
untrue to say that the Greek, any more than the Hebrew, had any definite
belief in the eternal existence of matter. The beginning of things
vanished into the distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but
with ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: A thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways,
She treads the path that she untreads again; 908
Her more than haste is mated with delays,
Like the proceedings of a drunken brain,
Full of respects, yet nought at all respecting,
In hand with all things, nought at all effecting.
Here kennel'd in a brake she finds a hound, 9l3
And asks the weary caitiff for his master,
And there another licking of his wound,
Gainst venom'd sores the only sovereign plaster; 916
And here she meets another sadly scowling,
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