| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: simply to expose the plague-sores upon it. We listened to just such a
pamphlet as Rameau's Nephew, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the
course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which
the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken
for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save
the sceptic's adopted article of belief--the omnipotence, omniscience,
and universal applicability of money.
After some target practice at the outer circle of their acquaintances,
they turned their ill-natured shafts at their intimate friends. With a
sign I explained my wish to stay and listen as soon as Bixiou took up
his parable, as will shortly be seen. And so we listened to one of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: heart.
"Madame," said Augustine in a broken voice, "the step I am about to
take will seem to you very strange; but there is a madness of despair
which ought to excuse anything. I understand only too well why
Theodore prefers your house to any other, and why your mind has so
much power over his. Alas! I have only to look into myself to find
more than ample reasons. But I am devoted to my husband, madame. Two
years of tears have not effaced his image from my heart, though I have
lost his. In my folly I dared to dream of a contest with you; and I
have come to you to ask you by what means I may triumph over yourself.
Oh, madame," cried the young wife, ardently seizing the hand which her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: down the grey Nilotic flats
At twilight and the flickering bats flew round
the temple's triple glyphs
Steal to the border of the bar and swim across
the silent lake
And slink into the vault and make the Pyramid
your lupanar
Till from each black sarcophagus rose up the
painted swathed dead?
Or did you lure unto your bed the ivory-horned
Tragelaphos?
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