| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing
was ever to happen. He glanced about him at the
unpruned garden, the tumble-down house, and the oak-
grove under which the dusk was gathering. It had
seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have
found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and
even the pink sunshade was not hers . . .
He frowned and hesitated. "You don't know, I
suppose-- I shall be in Boston tomorrow. If I could
manage to see her--"
He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: and wickedness of all things, and that there was in them no limit to
pleasures and self-indulgence, devised the limit of law and order, whereby,
as you say, Philebus, she torments, or as I maintain, delivers the soul.--
What think you, Protarchus?
PROTARCHUS: Her ways are much to my mind, Socrates.
SOCRATES: You will observe that I have spoken of three classes?
PROTARCHUS: Yes, I think that I understand you: you mean to say that the
infinite is one class, and that the finite is a second class of existences;
but what you would make the third I am not so certain.
SOCRATES: That is because the amazing variety of the third class is too
much for you, my dear friend; but there was not this difficulty with the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: in all good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had
portrayed our mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us,
women of rank, women of taste, intellectual and clever; when we
had endowed them with little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately
fragrant skin, then came the admission--on his part that Madame
Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine that I
worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and
fast, when we found that we were in the same confraternity of
love. It was which of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for
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