| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: country lost to the economic comity of Europe. And, as one
country follows another over the brink, so will the remaining
countries be faced by conditions of increasingly narrow
self-dependence, in fact by the very conditions which in
Russia, so far, have received their clearest, most forcible
illustration.
THE SHORTAGE OF MEN
In the preceding chapter I wrote of Russia's many wants, and
of the processes visibly at work, tending to make her
condition worse and not better. But I wrote of things, not
of people. I wrote of the shortage of this and of that, but
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: spirit and manner were not haughty enough to overawe his relations,
and naturally he had come at last to be accounted less than nothing
with them, though he was not altogether despised.
He had suffered acutely among them, but, like all timid creatures, he
kept silence as to his pain; and so by degrees schooled himself to
hide his feelings, and learned to take sanctuary in his inmost self.
Many superficial persons interpret this conduct by the short word
"selfishness;" and, indeed, the resemblance between the egoist and the
solitary human creature is strong enough to seem to justify the
harsher verdict; and this is especially true in Paris, where nobody
observes others closely, where all things pass swift as waves, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: Of the quarrel now imminent.
There, face to face,
'Mid the ruins and tombs of a long-perish'd race,
With, for witness, the stern Autumn Sky overhead,
And beneath them, unnoticed, the graves, and the dead,
Those two men had met, as it were on the ridge
Of that perilous, narrow, invisible bridge
Dividing the Past from the Future, so small
That if one should pass over, the other must fall.
XIX.
On the ear, at that moment, the sound of a hoof,
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