| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: various colloquies, the sight of the sky, the coolness of the air, the
aspect of Andernach and the shimmering of the waters of the Rhine,--
these impressions came to the soul of the young man vaguely,
confusedly, torpidly, like all the sensations he had felt since his
waking. There were moments, he said, when he thought he was no longer
living.
I was then in prison. Enthusiastic, as we all are at twenty years of
age, I wished to defend my country, and I commanded a company of free
lances, which I had organized in the vicinity of Andernach. A few days
before these events I had fallen plump, during the night, into a
French detachment of eight hundred men. We were two hundred at the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the
mediaeval Nobility has been as much slandered as the mediaeval
Church; and the exceptions taken--as more salient and exciting--for
the average: that side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix
hundreds of honest gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the
best of their light, and were raising, and not depressing, the
masses below them--one very important item in that duty being, the
doing the whole fighting of the country at their own expense,
instead of leaving it to a standing army of mercenaries, at the beck
and call of a despot; and that, as M. de Tocqueville says: "In
feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty much as the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.
Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.
But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Poem: Taedium Vitae
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