| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: had finished with me he set to work on my tutor, Yegor
Alexyevitch Pobyedimsky. My beloved tutor was then at the stage
when young men watch the growth of their moustache and are
critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the devout awe
with which Spiridon approached him. Yegor Alexyevitch had to
throw back his head, to straddle his legs like an inverted V,
first lift up his arms, then let them fall. Spiridon measured him
several times, walking round him during the process like a
love-sick pigeon round its mate, going down on one knee, bending
double. . . . My mother, weary, exhausted by her exertions and
heated by ironing, watched these lengthy proceedings, and said:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: resemblance to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it.
Order being re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective
lines, and the commandant of the city appointed, military
administration began. The place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all
things were organized on a French system, the Spaniards were left free
to follow "in petto" their national tastes.
This period of pillage (it is difficult to determine how long it
lasted) had, like all other sublunary effects, a cause, not so
difficult to discover. In the marechal's army was a regiment, composed
almost entirely of Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene,
a man of remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: fatality adopted by so many historians. I have elsewhere
discussed the significance of such fatalities, and have shown
that the whole effort of civilisation consists in trying to
escape therefrom. Certainly history is full of necessities, but
it is also full of contingent facts which were, and might not
have been. Napoleon himself, on St. Helena, enumerated six
circumstances which might have checked his prodigious career. He
related, notably, that on taking a bath at Auxonne, in 1786, he
only escaped death by the fortuitous presence of a sandbank. If
Bonaparte had died, then we may admit that another general would
have arisen, and might have become dictator. But what would have
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