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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: whole, the better, because he saw it across a grave. All men, all
things, he analyzed once and for all; he summed up the Past,
represented by its records; the Present in the law, its
crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took
spirit and matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found--
Nothing. Thenceforward he became DON JUAN.
At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the beauty
of youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he
despised the world, and made the utmost of the world. His
felicity could not have been of the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in
periodically recurrent bouilli, in the comforts of a warming-pan,
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