| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: of Gerard Dow's Money Changer; not a grain of salt too much, not a
single profit foregone; but the economical principles by which it was
regulated were relaxed in favor of the greenhouse and garden. "The
garden was the master's craze," Mlle. Cadot used to say. The master's
blind fondness for Joseph was not a craze in her eyes; she shared the
father's predilection; she pampered Joseph; she darned his stockings;
and would have been better pleased if the money spent on the garden
had been put by for Joseph's benefit.
That garden was kept in marvelous order by a single man; the paths,
covered with river-sand, continually turned over with the rake,
meandered among the borders full of the rarest flowers. Here were all
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship
lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary inn
frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden
footway, bridging one marish spot after another. Here and
there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white
roses. More of the bay became apparent, and soon the blue
peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level of the island
opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from the
city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to
awake among the sand-hills. It called to us over the waters
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: because we know the impossibility of such
happiness; and, just as our ancestors used to
fling themselves from one delusion to another,
we pass indifferently from doubt to doubt,
without possessing, as they did, either hope or
even that vague though, at the same time, keen
enjoyment which the soul encounters at every
struggle with mankind or with destiny.
These and many other similar thoughts passed
through my mind, but I did not follow them up,
because I do not like to dwell upon abstract
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