| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: crowds--men, in a word, of genuine and strong convictions--exert
a far greater force than men who deny, who criticise, or who are
indifferent, but it must not be forgotten that, given the power
possessed at present by crowds, were a single opinion to acquire
sufficient prestige to enforce its general acceptance, it would
soon be endowed with so tyrannical a strength that everything
would have to bend before it, and the era of free discussion
would be closed for a long time. Crowds are occasionally
easy-going masters, as were Heliogabalus and Tiberius, but they
are also violently capricious. A civilisation, when the moment
has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: They gat them to the thicket, to the deepest of the shade,
And lay with sleepless eyes in the deadly ambuscade.
And oft in the starry even the song of morning rose,
What time the oven smoked in the country of their foes;
For oft to loving hearts, and waiting ears and sight,
The lads that went to forage returned not with the night.
Now first the children sickened, and then the women paled,
And the great arms of the warrior no more for war availed.
Hushed was the deep drum, discarded was the dance;
And those that met the priest now glanced at him askance.
The priest was a man of years, his eyes were ruby-red, (2)
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: see a woman so much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange,
and you can read her heart; as rare (dear me!) in Paris as the Singing
Flower in the Indies. But in spite of a friendship dating from the
d'Aldriggers' first appearance at the Nucingens', Ferdinand did not
marry Malvina. Our ferocious friend was not apparently jealous of
Desroches, who paid assiduous court to the young lady; Desroches
wanted to pay off the rest of the purchase-money due for his
connection; Malvina could not well have less than fifty thousand
crowns, he thought, and so the lawyer was fain to play the lover.
Malvina, deeply humiliated as she was by du Tillet's carelessness,
loved him too well to shut the door upon him. With her, an
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