| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: witness the uttermost lengths to which man's folly would go, thou hast
bidden thy lovers walk on all fours, and required of them their lands
and wealth, nay, even their wives if they were worth aught to thee.
Thou hast devoured millions of men without a cause; thou hast flung
away lives like sand blown by the wind from West to East. Thou hast
come down from the heights of thought to sit among the kings of men.
Woman! instead of comforting men, thou hast tormented and afflicted
them! Knowing that thou couldst ask and have, thou hast demanded--
blood! A little flour surely should have contented thee, accustomed as
thou hast been to live on bread and to mingle water with thy wine.
Unlike all others in all things, formerly thou wouldst bid thy lovers
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: morning in the newspapers."
"No matter for that, they /are/ watching you. I have seen it. There is
a little old man, who takes a great deal of snuff, who is always
within hearing distance of you; when you speak he seems to pay more
attention to your words than to those of the others; and once I saw
him write something down in a note-book in marks that were not
writing."
"Well, the next time he comes, point him out to me."
The next time proved to be the next day. The person shown to me was a
short man with gray hair, a rather neglected person and a face deeply
pitted with the small-pox, which seemed to make him about fifty years
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo
and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life
has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes
a new DE AMICITIA must find a niche for them, and praise them in
Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time. To censure
them would show 'a lack of appreciation.' They are merely out of
their sphere: that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no
contagion. High thoughts and high emotions are by their very
existence isolated.
I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of
May, and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad
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