| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: gave a faint, pale light, almost absorbed by the walls; the rest of
the room lay well-nigh in the dark. But the dim brightness,
concentrated upon the holy things, looked like a ray from Heaven
shining down upon the unadorned shrine. The floor was reeking with
damp. An icy wind swept in through the chinks here and there, in a
roof that rose sharply on either side, after the fashion of attic
roofs. Nothing could be less imposing; yet perhaps, too, nothing could
be more solemn than this mournful ceremony. A silence so deep that
they could have heard the faintest sound of a voice on the Route
d'Allemagne, invested the nightpiece with a kind of sombre majesty;
while the grandeur of the service--all the grander for the strong
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: skill to exploit a business. You will not have long to wait for proof.
In a very short time you will see the aristocracy, the court, and
public men descend into speculation in serried columns; you will see
that their claws are longer, their morality more crooked than ours,
while they have not our good points. What a head a man must have if he
has to found a business in times when the shareholder is as covetous
and keen as the inventor! What a great magnetizer must he be that can
create a Claparon and hit upon expedients never tried before! Do you
know the moral of it all? Our age is no better than we are; we live in
an era of greed; no one troubles himself about the intrinsic value of
a thing if he can only make a profit on it by selling it to somebody
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: the wagon, for I was too tired to accompany them, having found
that Anscombe was still asleep, I determined to follow his
example. Finding a long chair on the stoep, I sat down and
slumbered in it sweetly for hours. I dreamt of all sorts of
things, then through my dreams it seemed to me that I heard two
voices talking, those of our Marnham and Rodd, not on the stoep,
but at a distance from it. As a matter of fact they were
talking, but so far away that in my ordinary waking state I could
never have heard them. My own belief is that the senses, and I
may add the semi-spiritual part of us, are much more acute when
we lie half bound in the bonds of sleep, than when we are what is
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