| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Francis Bacon by Francis Bacon: Solomon, and beware of hasty gathering of riches;
Qui festinat ad divitias, non erit insons. The poets
feign, that when Plutus (which is Riches) is sent
from Jupiter, he limps and goes slowly; but when
he is sent from Pluto, he runs, and is swift of foot.
Meaning that riches gotten by good means, and
just labor, pace slowly; but when they come by
the death of others (as by the course of inheritance,
testaments, and the like), they come tumbling
upon a man. But it mought be applied likewise to
Pluto, taking him for the devil. For when riches
Essays of Francis Bacon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: toil of many generations has cut terraces in the cliff, so that the
face of the rock reflects the rays of the sun, and the produce of hot
climates may be grown out of doors in an artificially high temperature.
A church spire, rising out of one of the shallower dips in the line of
cliffs, marks the little village of Saint-Cyr, to which the scattered
houses all belong. And yet a little further the Choisille flows into
the Loire, through a fertile valley cut in the long low downs.
La Grenadiere itself, half-way up the hillside, and about a hundred
paces from the church, is one of those old-fashioned houses dating
back some two or three hundred years, which you find in every
picturesque spot in Touraine. A fissure in the rock affords convenient
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: hands, that no really good needlewoman--no one, indeed, whose
work or character was worth consideration--could have endured,
no matter for what reason, the unpicking of her day's work, day
after day for between three and four years.
{187} We must suppose Dolius not yet to know that his son
Melanthius had been tortured, mutilated, and left to die by
Ulysses' orders on the preceding day, and that his daughter
Melantho had been hanged. Dolius was probably exceptionally
simple-minded, and his name was ironical. So on Mt. Eryx I was
shown a man who was always called Sonza Malizia or
"Guileless"--he being held exceptionally cunning.
The Odyssey |
