| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never
see them again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will,
and settled all your affairs, and are a free man--then you are
ready for a walk.
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I
sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves
knights of a new, or rather an old, order--not Equestrians or
Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more
ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic
spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in,
or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker--not the Knight,
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: debt due to you of a thousand francs, each one of them gets so much
per cent, 'so much in the pound,' in legal phrase; so much (that
means) in proportion to the amounts severally claimed by the
creditors. But--the creditors cannot touch the money without a special
order from the clerk of the court. Do you guess what all this work
drawn up by a judge and prepared by attorneys must mean? It means a
quantity of stamped paper full of diffuse lines and blanks, the
figures almost lost in vast spaces of completely empty ruled columns.
The first proceeding is to deduct the costs. Now, as the costs are
precisely the same whether the amount attached is one thousand or one
million francs, it is not difficult to eat up three thousand francs
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: a list of the obligations his passion imposed upon him.
Every day, or nearly every day, he was obliged to be on horseback in
the Bois, between two and three o'clock, in the careful dress of a
gentleman of leisure. He had to learn at what house or theatre he
could meet Madame de Vandenesse in the evening. He was not able to
leave the party or the play until long after midnight, having obtained
nothing better than a few tender sentences, long awaited, said in a
doorway, or hastily as he put her into her carriage. It frequently
happened that Marie, who by this time had launched him into the great
world, procured for him invitations to dinner in certain houses where
she went herself. All this seemed the simplest life in the world to
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