| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: every nerve. The bones of her face showed plainly through the sallow,
almost olive-tinted wrinkles of the skin. The shrunken, ice-cold old
woman wore a black robe, which she trailed in the dust, and at her
throat there was something white, which I dared not examine. I could
scarcely see her wan and colorless eyes, for they were fixed in a
stare upon the heavens. She drew me after her along the aisles,
leaving a trace of her presence in the ashes that she shook from her
dress. Her bones rattled as she walked, like the bones of a skeleton;
and as we went I heard behind me the tinkling of a little bell, a
thin, sharp sound that rang through my head like the notes of a
harmonica.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The White Moll by Frank L. Packard: call. You understand, don't you? There's never been a yip out
of the police. Our methods are too good for that. Look at the
Sparrow to-night. Where there's no chance taken of suspicion
going anywhere except where we lead it, there's no chance of any
trouble - for us! But this cursed she-fiend's another story.
We're not planting plum trees for her to pick any more of the fruit.
Understand?"
She answered him mechanically.
"Yes," she said.
"All right, then; that end of it is up to you," he said significantly.
"You're clever, clever as the devil, Bertha. Use your brains now
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: thing which we do not know, with another thing which we do not know; nor
can we think that which we do not know to be that which we know, or that
which we know to be that which we do not know. And what other case is
conceivable, upon the supposition that we either know or do not know all
things? Let us try another answer in the sphere of being: 'When a man
thinks, and thinks that which is not.' But would this hold in any parallel
case? Can a man see and see nothing? or hear and hear nothing? or touch
and touch nothing? Must he not see, hear, or touch some one existing
thing? For if he thinks about nothing he does not think, and not thinking
he cannot think falsely. And so the path of being is closed against us, as
well as the path of knowledge. But may there not be 'heterodoxy,' or
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