| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of
savages.
As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain
of the Beresina at nine o'clock in the morning, when she was awakened
by a cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the
experiment was to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants
made a frightful clamor like that on the shore of the river that
memorable night, when twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death
or slavery by their own folly.
At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and
ran, with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: career. There was plenty of money and--and all the rest of it; for by
inheritance came to me the acquaintance of many people whose names you
would be likely to have heard of. Cities, people of fashion, artists--the
whole of it was my element and my choice; and by-and-by I married, not
only where it was desirable, but where I loved. Then for the first time
Death laid his staff upon my enchantment, and I understood many things
that had been only words to me hitherto. To have been a husband for a
year, and a father for a moment, and in that moment to lose all--this
unblinded me. Looking back, it seemed to me that I had never done anything
except for myself all my days. I left the world. In due time I became a
priest and lived in my own country. But my worldly experience and my
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: VAILIMA, JULY 7TH, 1894.
DEAR HENRY JAMES, - I am going to try and dictate to you a letter
or a note, and begin the same without any spark of hope, my mind
being entirely in abeyance. This malady is very bitter on the
literary man. I have had it now coming on for a month, and it
seems to get worse instead of better. If it should prove to be
softening of the brain, a melancholy interest will attach to the
present document. I heard a great deal about you from my mother
and Graham Balfour; the latter declares that you could take a First
in any Samoan subject. If that be so, I should like to hear you on
the theory of the constitution. Also to consult you on the force
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