| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: the "Republic." The party of Order seems constantly engaged in a
"Reaction," which, neither more nor less than in Prussia, is directed
against the press, the right of association and the like, and is
enforced by brutal police interventions on the part of the bureaucracy,
the police and the public prosecutor--just as in Prussia; the Mountain
on the contrary, is engaged with equal assiduity in parrying these
attacks, and thus in defending the "eternal rights of man"--as every
so-called people's party has more or less done for the last hundred and
fifty years. At a closer inspection, however, of the situation and of
the parties, this superficial appearance, which veils the Class
Struggle, together with the peculiar physiognomy of this period,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: Good God--as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all
now in a drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play,
his sudden resolve to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten
thousand dollars of his inheritance on testing his chance of
success--the fever of preparation, the dry-mouthed agony of the
"first night," the flat fall, the stupid press, his secret rush
to Europe to escape the condolence of his friends!
"IT ISN'T AS IF YOU HADN'T TRIED ALL KINDS."
No--he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the
light curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-
realistic and the lyrical-romantic--finally deciding that he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: not exactly an easy matter to deliver my message. For divers
reasons into which I need not enter, I had barely sufficient
money to take me to Moulins. However, my youthful enthusiasm
determined to hasten thither on foot as fast as possible. Bad
news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the chateau. I
asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I
felt at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast
numbers of romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds
of situations in which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan,
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