| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: hidden in camellias and cypresses above the lake, or the great
rooms on the Giudecca with the shimmer of the canal always
playing over their frescoed ceilings! Yet she had come to
imagine that these places really belonged to them, that they
would always go on living, fondly and irreproachably, in the
frame of other people's wealth .... That, again, was the curse
of her love of beauty, the way she always took to it as if it
belonged to her!
Well, the awakening was bound to come, and it was perhaps better
that it should have come so soon. At any rate there was no use
in letting her thoughts wander back to that shattered fool's
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling
together in unity. And the late folk will tell
themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion
of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments - the
parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many
admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in
this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.
Again, meditative people will find a charm in a
certain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its
odd and stirring history. Few places, if any, offer a
more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: gathering. The efforts made by the socialists to assemble in
great congresses the representatives of the working-class
populations of different countries, have always ended in the most
pronounced discord. A Latin crowd, however revolutionary or
however conservative it be supposed, will invariably appeal to
the intervention of the State to realise its demands. It is
always distinguished by a marked tendency towards centralisation
and by a leaning, more or less pronounced, in favour of a
dictatorship. An English or an American crowd, on the contrary,
sets no store on the State, and only appeals to private
initiative. A French crowd lays particular weight on equality
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