| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: water in her bath! Hypocritical and generous; loving tawdriness and
simplicity; devoid of taste, but protecting the arts; and in spite of
these antitheses, really great in everything by instinct or by
temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at thirty; and then,
like my grocer buried in Pere Lachaise, a good husband and a good
father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings, codes,
verses, a romance--and all with more range than precision. Did he not
aim at making all Europe France? And after making us weigh on the
earth in such a way as to change the laws of gravitation, he left us
poorer than on the day when he first laid hands on us; while he, who
had taken an empire by his name, lost his name on the frontier of his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tanach: Esther 8: 10 And they wrote in the name of king Ahasuerus, and sealed it with the king's ring, and sent letters by posts on horseback, riding on swift steeds that were used in the king's service, bred of the stud;
Esther 8: 11 that the king had granted the Jews that were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, and to slay, and to cause to perish, all the forces of the people and province that would assault them, their little ones and women, and to take the spoil of them for a prey,
Esther 8: 12 upon one day in all the provinces of king Ahasuerus, namely, upon the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar.
Esther 8: 13 The copy of the writing, to be given out for a decree in every province, was to be published unto all the peoples, and that the Jews should be ready against that day to avenge themselves on their enemies.
Esther 8: 14 So the posts that rode upon swift steeds that were used in the king's service went out, being hastened and pressed on by the king's commandment; and the decree was given out in Shushan the castle.
Esther 8: 15 And Mordecai went forth from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a rob of fine linen and purple; and the city of Shushan shouted and was glad.
The Tanach |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by
means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember
when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were
strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in
the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit
of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going
out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I
went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined
myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit
side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering,
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