| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: obstacles. He was constantly absorbed in one overwhelming thought,
consumed with a single desire that burned his entrails, gnawed more
cruelly still by the ever-increasing agony of the duel he was fighting
with himself since his passion for gold had turned to his own injury,
--a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the
miseries of life and in those of death.
Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident
into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has,
like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth.
But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of
neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: decrepitude came upon him, and with those days the constant
importunity of physical feebleness, an importunity all the more
distressing by contrast with the wealth of memories of his
impetuous youth and the sensual pleasures of middle age. The
unbeliever who in the height of his cynical humor had been wont
to persuade others to believe in laws and principles at which he
scoffed, must repose nightly upon a PERHAPS. The great Duke, the
pattern of good breeding, the champion of many a carouse, the
proud ornament of Courts, the man of genius, the graceful winner
of hearts that he had wrung as carelessly as a peasant twists an
osier withe, was now the victim of a cough, of a ruthless
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear. I
struck at this, and caught something threadlike. It was drawn
swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I
saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that
stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their
stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast
ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon
me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a
month between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the
same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped.
Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the
The Time Machine |
