| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: never abandon, cherishing it even when the sword of his logic was
cutting off their dazzling wings.
"Heaven," he would say, "must, after all, be the survival of our
perfected faculties, and hell the void into which our unperfected
faculties are cast away."
But how, then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the
religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time
of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could
men help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by
divine interposition? Of whom but of God Himself could sages demand an
account of an invisible creature so actively and so reactively
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: late,' and, in a moment, the wainscoting had closed behind them,
and the Tapestry Chamber was empty.
CHAPTER VI
ABOUT ten minutes later, the bell rang for tea, and, as Virginia
did not come down, Mrs. Otis sent up one of the footmen to tell
her. After a little time he returned and said that he could not
find Miss Virginia anywhere. As she was in the habit of going out
to the garden every evening to get flowers for the dinner-table,
Mrs. Otis was not at all alarmed at first, but when six o'clock
struck, and Virginia did not appear, she became really agitated,
and sent the boys out to look for her, while she herself and Mr.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: ebb. Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one,
and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the
echoing policeman and the lamps and stars. But the Toll
House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the
bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet
grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips
volleyed, and the tide was gone. North and south had the two
stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but
there was still an interval before the flush had fallen on
your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented with
the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed
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