| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: he sometimes threatened her. Who has not seen the wonderful self-
devotion shown by provincials who consecrate their lives to the care
of sufferers, possibly because of the disgrace heaped upon a
bourgeoise if she allows her husband or children to be taken to a
public hospital? Moreover, who does not know the repugnance which
these people feel to the payment of the two or three thousand francs
required at Charenton or in the private lunatic asylums? If any one
had spoken to Madame Margaritis of Doctors Dubuisson, Esquirol,
Blanche, and others, she would have preferred, with noble indignation,
to keep her thousands and take care of the "good-man" at home.
As the incomprehensible whims of this lunatic are connected with the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: labours of many generations of kings through long ages. It was for the
most part rectangular and oblong, and where falling out of the straight
line followed the circular ditch. The depth, and width, and length of this
ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent,
in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial.
Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of
a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stadium everywhere; it was carried
round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length. It
received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round
the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea. Further
inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be
quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening
of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these
phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute,
convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of
life, can torture and slay.
What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the
source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does "compete
with life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to
half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality.
The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from
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