| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins interminable labours,
joins himself into federations and populous cities, spends
his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit
unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of
unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days. His
sight, which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest
stars, which is miraculous in every way and a thing defying
explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and
can be extinguished with a touch. His heart, which all
through life so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but
a capsule, and may be stopped with a pin. His whole body,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: thought that she no longer cared for Ryabovsky, and that, thank
God, it was all over now. But as she drank her coffee she
reflected that Ryabovsky had robbed her of her husband, and that
now she was left with neither her husband nor Ryabovsky; then she
remembered talks she had heard among her acquaintances of a
picture Ryabovsky was preparing for the exhibition, something
striking, a mixture of genre and landscape, in the style of
Polyenov, about which every one who had been into his studio went
into raptures; and this, of course, she mused, he had created
under her influence, and altogether, thanks to her influence, he
had greatly changed for the better. Her influence was so
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: dread to think that it is all on three chances. If the three were
to fail, I am in a bog. The novel is called A VENDETTA IN THE
WEST. I see I am in a grasping, dismal humour, and should, as we
Americans put it, quit writing. In truth, I am so haunted by
anxieties that one or other is sure to come up in all that I write.
I will send you herewith a Monterey paper where the works of R. L.
S. appear, nor only that, but all my life on studying the
advertisements will become clear. I lodge with Dr. Heintz; take my
meals with Simoneau; have been only two days ago shaved by the
tonsorial artist Michaels; drink daily at the Bohemia saloon; get
my daily paper from Hadsel's; was stood a drink to-day by Albano
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