| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: and completed its destruction.
The countess guessed the past from the present, and read the future.
Though nothing is so difficult as to make a man happy when he knows
himself to blame, she set herself to that task, which is worthy of an
angel. She became stoical. Descending into an abyss, whence she still
could see the sky, she devoted herself to the care of one man as the
sister of charity devotes herself to many. To reconcile him with
himself, she forgave him that for which he had no forgiveness. The
count grew miserly; she accepted the privations he imposed. Like all
who have known the world only to acquire its suspiciousness, he feared
betrayal; she lived in solitude and yielded without a murmur to his
The Lily of the Valley |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising
despotism, and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has
set forth in a book which I shall have occasion often to quote. To
it is owing, too, that longing, which seems to us childish, after
ancient forms, etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities
diplomatic, legal, ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to
keepsakes of the past--revered relics of more intelligible and
better-ordered times. If the spirit had been beaten out of them in
a century of battle, that was all the more reason for keeping up the
letter. They had had a meaning once, a life once; perhaps there was
a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry bones would clothe
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: of two talents, one talent being the weight which others thought
sufficient. He fell during this siege in a battle near the
theater.
The Rhodians made a brave defense, insomuch that Demetrius saw
he was making but little progress, and only persisted out of
obstinacy and passion; and the rather because the Rhodians,
having captured a ship in which some clothes and furniture, with
letters from herself; were coming to him from Phila his wife,
had sent on everything to Ptolemy, and had not copied the
honorable example of the Athenians, who, having surprised an
express sent from king Philip, their enemy, opened all the
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