| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: your head, your coat, and your name well; to inhabit a charming little
entresol after the pattern of the rooms just described on the Quai
Malaquais; to be able to ask a party of friends to dine at the Rocher
de Cancale without a previous consultation with your trousers' pocket;
never to be pulled up in any rational project by the words, 'And the
money?' and finally, to be able to renew at pleasure the pink rosettes
that adorn the ears of three thoroughbreds and the lining of your hat?
"To such inquiry any ordinary young man (and we ourselves that are not
ordinary men) would reply that the happiness is incomplete; that it is
like the Madeleine without the altar; that a man must love and be
loved, or love without return, or be loved without loving, or love at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: their false prophet, till Mahomet struck off his head.
Nor did the resentment of Mahomet end here; he divided his body into
quarters, and sent them to different places. The Catholics gathered
the remains of this glorious martyr, and interred them. Every Moor
that passed by threw a stone upon his grave, and raised in time such
a heap, as I found it difficult to remove when I went in search of
those precious relics.
What I have here related of the death of Don Christopher de Gama I
was told by an old man, who was an eye-witness of it: and there is
a tradition in the country that in the place where his head fell, a
fountain sprung up of wonderful virtue, which cured many diseases
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: with palm groves, thickets, and romantic dingles four feet deep,
relics of old taro plantation; and it is thus possible to stumble
unawares on folk resting or hiding from their work. About pistol-
shot from our township there lay a pond in the bottom of a jungle;
here the maids of the isle came to bathe, and were several times
alarmed by our intrusion. Not for them are the bright cold rivers
of Tahiti or Upolu, not for them to splash and laugh in the hour of
the dusk with a villageful of gay companions; but to steal here
solitary, to crouch in a place like a cow-wallow, and wash (if that
can be called washing) in lukewarm mud, brown as their own skins.
Other, but still rare, encounters occur to my memory. I was
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