| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim
is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing
annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for,
as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its
essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every
other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a
ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to
a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs
then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted
privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do
we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien well in sight.
At length one day Chatelet called attention to the fact that whenever
he went with M. de Chandour to Mme. de Bargeton's and found Lucien
there, there was not a sign nor a trace of anything suspicious; the
boudoir door stood open, the servants came and went, there was nothing
mysterious to betray the sweet crime of love, and so forth and so
forth. Stanislas, who did not lack a certain spice of stupidity in his
composition, vowed that he would cross the room on tiptoe the next
day, and the perfidious Amelie held him to his bargain.
For Lucien that morrow was the day on which a young man tugs out some
of the hairs of his head, and inwardly vows that he will give up the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: But right for a gate of the reef he silently headed the bark,
And wielding the single paddle with passionate sweep on sweep,
Drove her, the little fitted, forth on the open deep.
And fear, there where she sat, froze the woman to stone:
Not fear of the crazy boat and the weltering deep alone;
But a keener fear of the night, the dark, and the ghostly hour,
And the thing that drove the canoe with more than a mortal's power
And more than a mortal's boldness. For much she knew of the dead
That haunt and fish upon reefs, toiling, like men, for bread,
And traffic with human fishers, or slay them and take their ware,
Till the hour when the star of the dead (15) goes down, and the morning air
Ballads |
