| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: See Honour smitten on the cheek and gyves
Bind the sweet feet of Mercy: Poverty
Creeps through our sunless lanes and with sharp knives
Cuts the warm throats of children stealthily,
And no word said:- O we are wretched men
Unworthy of our great inheritance! where is the pen
Of austere Milton? where the mighty sword
Which slew its master righteously? the years
Have lost their ancient leader, and no word
Breaks from the voiceless tripod on our ears:
While as a ruined mother in some spasm
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: difficult to explain how and why, in spite of her fortune and her
three lovers, she was still unmarried. In the first place,
Mademoiselle Cormon, following the custom and rule of her house, had
always desired to marry a nobleman; but from 1788 to 1798 public
circumstances were very unfavorable to such pretensions. Though she
wanted to be a woman of condition, as the saying is, she was horribly
afraid of the Revolutionary tribunal. The two sentiments, equal in
force, kept her stationary by a law as true in ethics as it is in
statics. This state of uncertain expectation is pleasing to unmarried
women as long as they feel themselves young, and in a position to
choose a husband. France knows that the political system of Napoleon
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: of Renouard's victims. It didn't take me long to judge that he was
drugging himself. Not drinking. Drugs."
"Ah! It's now that you are trying to murder him," she cried.
"Really. Always the Renouard of shopkeepers' legend. Listen! I
would never have been jealous of him. And yet I am jealous of the
air you breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees
you - moving free - not mine. But never mind. I rather liked him.
For a certain reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant
here. He said he believed this would save him. It did not save
him from death. It came to him as it were from nothing - just a
fall. A mere slip and tumble of ten feet into a ravine. But it
Within the Tides |
