| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: has done with illusions?
"If you had kept a pot boiling for some actress who gave you your fun
for it--well; that is what you may call a cabinet matter. But to live
with another man's wife? It is a draft at sight on disaster; it is
bolting the bitter pills of vice with none of the gilding."
"That will do. One word answers it all; I love Madame de la Baudraye,
and prefer her to every fortune, to every position the world can
offer.--I may have been carried away by a gust of ambition, but
everything must give way to the joy of being a father."
"Ah, ha! you have a fancy for paternity? But, wretched man, we are the
fathers only of our legitimate children. What is a brat that does not
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining
powerful anti-narcotics. His struggles to keep awake were awful--alone
with night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that
man, instinctively perhaps, has best embodied--obedient thus to a
moral truth as yet devoid of actual proof.
At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and
commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succumbed to the
horrors of the torture he had himself created. Maddened by certain
thoughts more agonizing than those he had as yet resisted, he cut his
throat with a razor.
This death coincided, almost, with that of Louis XI. Nothing then
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific
studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this
consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every
day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose
partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck:
that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the
state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others
will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I
hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
