| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived:
the ESSAIS of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture
of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of
to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of
heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have
their 'linen decencies' and excited orthodoxies fluttered,
and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that
these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground
of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they
will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen
ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: A Prince of Bohemia
The Middle Classes
Chiffreville, Monsieur and Madame
The Quest of the Absolute
Claparon, Charles
A Bachelor's Establishment
Melmoth Reconciled
The Firm of Nucingen
A Man of Business
The Middle Classes
Cochin, Emile-Louis-Lucien-Emmanuel
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: things, he analyzed once and for all; he summed up the Past,
represented by its records; the Present in the law, its
crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took
spirit and matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found--
Nothing. Thenceforward he became DON JUAN.
At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the beauty
of youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he
despised the world, and made the utmost of the world. His
felicity could not have been of the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in
periodically recurrent bouilli, in the comforts of a warming-pan,
a lamp of a night, and a new pair of slippers once a quarter.
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