| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: to revery, nothing reposeful? Why indeed? Because no one in our day is
sure of the future; we are living our lives like prodigal annuitants.
One morning Clementine appeared to be thinking of something. She was
lying at full length on one of those marvellous couches from which it
is almost impossible to rise, the upholsterer having invented them for
lovers of the "far niente" and its attendant joys of laziness to sink
into. The doors of the greenhouse were open, letting the odors of
vegetation and the perfume of the tropics pervade the room. The young
wife was looking at her husband who was smoking a narghile, the only
form of pipe she would have suffered in that room. The portieres, held
back by cords, gave a vista through two elegant salons, one white and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social
institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they
should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust
of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the
general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about
the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train
teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and
provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt
MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was
manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in
default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: in the group of States on the Pacific coast. Above all, in these
last, we may look to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or
evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and all their own.
In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day
after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and
a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from Illinois,
a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and
from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country
ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a
foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race
contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have
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