| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: cried out,--
"Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!"
But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind
in the tree-tops, or the lowing of the cow on the back of which she
climbed. Then the colonel would wring his hands in despair,--despair
that was new each day.
One evening, under a calm sky, amid the silence and peace of that
rural haven, the doctor saw, from a distance, that the colonel was
loading his pistols. The old man felt then that the young man had
ceased to hope; he felt the blood rushing to his heart, and if he
conquered the vertigo that threatened him, it was because he would
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: aspect, and its pretended rationalism has become, especially in
recent years, a barely attenuated form of the narrowest clerical
spirit. Now, we have shown that no conciliation is possible
between dissimilar religious beliefs. The clericals when in
power could not therefore show themselves more tolerant towards
freethinkers than these latter are to-day toward the clericals.
These divisions, determined by differences of belief, were
complicated by the addition of the political conceptions derived
from those beliefs.
Many simple souls have for long believed that the real history of
France began with the year I. of the Republic. This rudimentary
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: Many had their faces consumed with red tetters; this, they thought,
had come to them through touching Hanno. Others imagined that it was
because they had eaten Salammbo's fishes, and far from repenting of
it, they dreamed of even more abominable sacrileges, so that the
abasement of the Punic Gods might be still greater. They would fain
have exterminated them.
In this way they lingered for three months along the eastern coast,
and then behind the mountain of Selloum, and as far as the first sands
of the desert. They sought for a place of refuge, no matter where.
Utica and Hippo-Zarytus alone had not betrayed them; but Hamilcar was
encompassing these two towns. Then they went northwards at haphazard
Salammbo |
