| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: foregone and profound horror of repairs and decoration, one of
the men who regard their position as Paris house-owners as a
business. In the vast chain of moral species, these people hold a
middle place between the miser and the usurer. Optimists in their
own interests, they are all faithful to the Austrian status quo.
If you speak of moving a cupboard or a door, of opening the most
indispensable air-hole, their eyes flash, their bile rises, they
rear like a frightened horse. When the wind blows down a few
chimney-pots they are quite ill, and deprive themselves of an
evening at the Gymnase or the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, "on
account of repairs." Hippolyte, who had seen the performance
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: after life not entirely out of place. Besides, some persons like to be
told all, and wish, as one of our cleverest critics has remarked, to
know by what chemical process oil was made to burn in Aladdin's lamp.
Jacquet, being a government employee, naturally applied to the
authorities for permission to exhume the body of Madame Jules and burn
it. He went to see the prefect of police, under whose protection the
dead sleep. That functionary demanded a petition. The blank was
brought that gives to sorrow its proper administrative form; it was
necessary to employ the bureaucratic jargon to express the wishes of a
man so crushed that words, perhaps, were lacking to him, and it was
also necessary to coldly and briefly repeat on the margin the nature
Ferragus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: has the power of making men happy, turn out to be more akin to pleasure
than to wisdom, the life of pleasure may still have the advantage over the
life of wisdom.
PROTARCHUS: True.
SOCRATES: Or suppose that the better life is more nearly allied to wisdom,
then wisdom conquers, and pleasure is defeated;--do you agree?
PROTARCHUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And what do you say, Philebus?
PHILEBUS: I say, and shall always say, that pleasure is easily the
conqueror; but you must decide for yourself, Protarchus.
PROTARCHUS: You, Philebus, have handed over the argument to me, and have
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