| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: I was a poor apothecary,
Yet here I stand, at thirty-eight,
A man of an assured estate.'
'Well,' answered Robin - 'well, and how?'
The smiling chemist tapped his brow.
'Rob,' he replied, 'this throbbing brain
Still worked and hankered after gain.
By day and night, to work my will,
It pounded like a powder mill;
And marking how the world went round
A theory of theft it found.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: full of meaning on both sides, but they never led to any advances.
Insensibly this man became the object of our secret admiration, though
we knew no reason for it. Did it lie in his secretly simple habits,
his monastic regularity, his hermit-like frugality, his idiotically
mechanical labor, allowing his mind to remain neuter or to work on his
own lines, seeming to us to hint at an expectation of some stroke of
good luck, or at some foregone conclusion as to his life?
After wandering for a long time among the Ruins of Palmyra, we forgot
them--we were young! Then came the Carnival, the Paris Carnival,
which, henceforth, will eclipse the old Carnival of Venice, unless
some ill-advised Prefect of Police is antagonistic.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Honor that is a friend begets a friend.
Whether or not we love him, still we have him;
And we must live somehow by what we have,
Or then we die. If you say chemistry,
Then you must have your molecules in motion,
And in their right abundance. Failing either,
You have not long to dance. Failing a friend,
A genius, or a madness, or a faith
Larger than desperation, you are here
For as much longer than you like as may be.
Imagining now, by way of an example,
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