| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner's pupil, one of
the heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his
brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter,
emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more
the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he
owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de
Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the
house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute
and an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has
an income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell
for their weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in
hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still
colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it
torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed
with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so
many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless
phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that
it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of
fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the
almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the
unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea,
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: or risk our necks on perilous steeps.
Finally we came to a small clearing, which resembled nothing
so much as the bottom of a giant well, and in the center of one of
the steep walls was an opening some thirty or forty feet square,
black and rugged, and somehow terrifying.
It was the entrance to the cave.
There Felipe halted.
"Here, senor. Here entered the Incas of Huanuco with
their gold."
He shivered as he spoke, and I fancied that his face grew
pale.
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