| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: take his pistols. Five men dragged the mare to the fire, and cut her
up with the dexterity of a Parisian butcher. The pieces were instantly
seized and flung upon the embers.
The major went up to the young woman, who had uttered a cry on
recognizing him. He found her motionless, seated on a cushion beside
the fire. She looked at him silently, without smiling. Philippe then
saw the soldier to whom he had confided the carriage; the man was
wounded. Overcome by numbers, he had been forced to yield to the
malingerers who attacked him; and, like the dog who defended to the
last possible moment his master's dinner, he had taken his share of
the booty, and was now sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a white
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: nonsense about an autonomous British Empire complete in
itself, contra mundum, the better for us. A world control is
fifty years overdue. Hence these disorders. "
"Still--it's rather a difficult proposition, as things are."
"Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond
in the tone of one who swears. "Don't I know that perhaps
it's impossible! But it's the only way to do it. Therefore, I
say, let's try to get it done. And everybody says, difficult,
difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try. And the only
real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another
says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: self-sacrifice, of terror, of civil war, and of bloody battle fields to
bring it into the world. Its gladiators found in the stern classic
traditions of the Roman republic the ideals and the form, the
self-deceptions, that they needed in order to conceal from themselves
the narrow bourgeois substance of their own struggles, and to keep their
passion up to the height of a great historic tragedy. Thus, at another
stage of development a century before, did Cromwell and the English
people draw from the Old Testament the language, passions and illusions
for their own bourgeois revolution. When the real goal was reached,
when the remodeling of English society was accomplished, Locke
supplanted Habakuk.
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