| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: What 'tis to love? how want of love tormenteth?
O! had thy mother borne so hard a mind, 203
She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind.
'What am I that thou shouldst contemn me this?
Or what great danger dwells upon my suit?
What were thy lips the worse for one poor kiss?
Speak, fair; but speak fair words, or else be mute:
Give me one kiss, I'll give it thee again, 209
And one for interest if thou wilt have twain.
'Fie! lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone,
Well-painted idol, image dull and dead, 212
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Francis Bacon by Francis Bacon: Qui festinat ad divitias, non erit insons. The poets
feign, that when Plutus (which is Riches) is sent
from Jupiter, he limps and goes slowly; but when
he is sent from Pluto, he runs, and is swift of foot.
Meaning that riches gotten by good means, and
just labor, pace slowly; but when they come by
the death of others (as by the course of inheritance,
testaments, and the like), they come tumbling
upon a man. But it mought be applied likewise to
Pluto, taking him for the devil. For when riches
come from the devil (as by fraud and oppression,
Essays of Francis Bacon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: the dim dusk of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere
definitely expressed, and looming the larger in the imagination;
for in the cloister the great saying, "Peace in the Lord,"
enters the least religious soul as a living force.
The monk's life is scarcely comprehensible. A man seems
confessed a weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live
out a life of work; he is evading a man's destiny in his cell.
But what man's strength, blended with pathetic weakness, is
implied by a woman's choice of the convent life! A man may have
any number of motives for burying himself in a monastery; for him
it is the leap over the precipice. A woman has but one
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