| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: and in mourning garb; on the other side, man on pleasure bent. And,
standing on the borderland of those two incongruous pictures, which
repeated thousands of times in diverse ways, make Paris the most
entertaining and most philosophical city in the world, I played a
mental /macedoine/[*], half jesting, half funereal. With my left foot
I kept time to the music, and the other felt as if it were in a tomb.
My leg was, in fact, frozen by one of those draughts which congeal one
half of the body while the other suffers from the intense heat of the
salons--a state of things not unusual at balls.
[*] /Macedoine/, in the sense in which it is here used, is a game, or
rather a series of games, of cards, each player, when it is his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: strangers might bring her a letter. At last, at daylight she took the
diligence for Lisieux.
The convent was at the end of a steep and narrow street. When she
arrived about at the middle of it, she heard strange noises, a funeral
knell. "It must be for some one else," thought she; and she pulled the
knocker violently.
After several minutes had elapsed, she heard footsteps, the door was
half opened and a nun appeared. The good sister, with an air of
compunction, told her that "she had just passed away." And at the same
time the tolling of Saint-Leonard's increased.
Felicite reached the second floor. Already at the threshold, she
A Simple Soul |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: rebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellow
Bootstrap-lifters to employ these arts for money-making; but you
notice that his magazine, "Advanced Thought", does not decline
the advertisements of such too-practical practitioners.
Next comes a gentleman with the musical name of Wallace Wattles,
who tells in one pamphlet "How to Be a Genius", and in another
pamphlet "How to Get What you Want". The thing for you to do is--
Saturate your mentality through and through with the knowledge
that YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO..... Look upon the
peanut-stand merely as the beginning of the department store, and
make it grow; you can.
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