| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: told him how sorry I was to see him in those melancholy
circumstances, and said some other civilities, suitable to the
occasion, I desired him to tell me freely and ingeniously,
whether the predictions Mr. Bickerstaff had publish'd relating to
his death, had not too much affected and worked on his
imagination. He confess'd he had often had it in his head, but
never with much apprehension, till about a fortnight before;
since which time it had the perpetual possession of his mind and
thoughts, and he did verily believe was the true natural cause of
his present distemper: For, said he, I am thoroughly persuaded,
and I think I have very good reasons, that Mr. Bickerstaff spoke
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: would tell me his dream of the night before. He had already
told it, it seemed, to all who would listen, and now again he
had considerable audience, crowding at the door. He said
that he dreamed he was in Cipango. At first he thought it
was heaven, but when he saw golden roofs he knew it must
be Cipango, for in heaven where it never rained and there
were no nights, we shouldn't need roofs. One interrupted,
``We'd need them to keep the flying angels from looking
in!''
``It was Cipango,'' persisted Francisco, ``for the Emperor
himself came and gave me a rope of pearls. There were
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy
flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of
equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote
puts La Palferine's genius before you in all its vivacity and
completeness. He realizes Pascal's /entre-deux/, he comprehends the
whole scale between tenderness and pitilessness, and, like
Epaminondas, he is equally great in extremes. And not merely so, his
epigram stamps the epoch; the /accoucheur/ is a modern innovation. All
the refinements of modern civilization are summed up in the phrase. It
is monumental."
"Look here, my dear Nathan, what farrago of nonsense is this?" asked
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