| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: were anxious to diminish his glory, but which it would be more
proper to call apparent contradictions. Envious people and fools,
having no knowledge of the determinations by which superior
spirits are moved, seize at once on superficial inconsistencies,
to formulate an accusation and so to pass sentence on them. If,
subsequently, the proceedings thus attacked are crowned with
success, showing the correlations of the preliminaries and the
results, a few of the vanguard of calumnies always survive. In
our day, for instance, Napoleon was condemned by our
contemporaries when he spread his eagle's wings to alight in
England: only 1822 could explain 1804 and the flatboats at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: and sense, till he had found in them the full expression,
as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval,
passions that without such justification would still have
dominated his temper. From cell to cell of his brain crept
the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible
of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling
nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful
to him because it made things real, became dear to him
now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.
The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence
of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast,
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: The old man was playing at random, without the slightest regard for
time or tune. His fingers traveled mechanically over the worn keys of
his instrument; he did not trouble himself over a false note now and
again (a /canard/, in the language of the orchestra), neither did the
dancers, nor, for that matter, did my old Italian's acolytes; for I
had made up my mind that he must be Italian, and an Italian he was.
There was something great, something too of the despot about this old
Homer bearing within him an /Odyssey/ doomed to oblivion. The
greatness was so real that it triumphed over his abject position; the
despotism so much a part of him, that it rose above his poverty.
There are violent passions which drive a man to good or evil, making
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