| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: that universal command of knowledge which makes a man the living
word, the great figure of his age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he
saw into the sufferer and his malady by an intuition, natural or
acquired, which enabled him to grasp the diagnostics peculiar to
the individual, to determine the very time, the hour, the minute
when an operation should be performed, making due allowance for
atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual
temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he
then studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the
elements contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to
man who absorbs them, deriving from them a particular expression
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: thing turn to ghost-stuff? Everything it had on turned,
didn't it? It shows that the reason its boots turned
too was because it still had them on after it started
to go ha'nting around, and if that ain't proof that them
blatherskites didn't get the boots, I'd like to know
what you'd CALL proof."
Think of that now. I never see such a head as that
boy had. Why, I had eyes and I could see things, but they
never meant nothing to me. But Tom Sawyer was different.
When Tom Sawyer seen a thing it just got up on its hind
legs and TALKED to him--told him everything it knowed.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: Faith! I was disgusted with France; I couldn't stand it. In fact, I
should certainly have got myself arrested; so off I went, with two or
three dashing fellows,--Selves, Besson, and others, who are now in
Egypt,--and we entered the service of pacha Mohammed; a queer sort of
fellow he was, too! Once a tobacco merchant in the bazaars, he is now
on the high-road to be a sovereign prince. You've all seen him in that
picture by Horace Vernet,--'The Massacre of the Mameluks.' What a
handsome fellow he was! But I wouldn't give up the religion of my
fathers and embrace Islamism; all the more because the abjuration
required a surgical operation which I hadn't any fancy for. Besides,
nobody respects a renegade. Now if they had offered me a hundred
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