| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: daughter held each other closely embraced in the truest sympathy,
"remember this, my Natalie: we all have our destiny as women, just as
men have their vocation as men. A woman is born to be a woman of the
world and a charming hostess, as a man is born to be a general or a
poet. Your vocation is to please. Your education has formed you for
society. In these days women should be educated for the salon as they
once were for the gynoecium. You were not born to be the mother of a
family or the steward of a household. If you have children, I hope
they will not come to spoil your figure on the morrow of your
marriage; nothing is so bourgeois as to have a child at once. If you
have them two or three years after your marriage, well and good;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: lying open on his wife's table. He picked up the book and looked
at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the
last . . . he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book
and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among
the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like
that . . .?
Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was
right--it IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn't read
it!"
Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases
are punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: CALLICLES: That again is true.
SOCRATES: Then the only friend worth mentioning, whom the tyrant can have,
will be one who is of the same character, and has the same likes and
dislikes, and is at the same time willing to be subject and subservient to
him; he is the man who will have power in the state, and no one will injure
him with impunity:--is not that so?
CALLICLES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And if a young man begins to ask how he may become great and
formidable, this would seem to be the way--he will accustom himself, from
his youth upward, to feel sorrow and joy on the same occasions as his
master, and will contrive to be as like him as possible?
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