The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: raining; it will be wet under foot on schooners, and the house will
leak; how well I know that! Here the showers only patter on the
iron roof, and sometimes roar; and within, the lamp burns steady on
the tafa-covered walls, with their dusky tartan patterns, and the
book-shelves with their thin array of books; and no squall can rout
my house or bring my heart into my mouth. - The well-pleased South
Sea Islander,
R. L. S.
Letter: TO E. L. BURLINGAME
[VAILIMA, DECEMBER 1890.]
MY DEAR BURLINGAME, - By some diabolical accident, I have mislaid
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: for an important affair, in which his pride was concerned. I was to
get a paper at the Palais in the case of Vandernesse versus
Vandernesse! What will become of me? Oh, save me for the sake of my
father and aunt! Come with me to Monsieur Desroches, and explain it to
him; make some excuse,--anything!"
These sentences were jerked out through sobs and tears that might have
moved the sphinx of Luxor.
"Old skinflint!" said the danseuse, who was crying, "will you let your
own nephew be dishonored,--the son of the man to whom you owe your
fortune?--for his name is Oscar Husson. Save him, or Titine will deny
you forever!"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible part
of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will
you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana.
With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both
present in the occasion that gave the belief birth. Many have
turned to the consolations of religion by reason of their own
wretchedness; Gautama sought its help touched by the woes of others
whom, in his own happy life journey, he chanced one day to come
across. Shocked by the sight of human disease, old age, and death,
sad facts to which hitherto he had been sedulously kept a stranger,
he renounced the world that he might find for it an escape from its
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