| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: gesture expressed the whole philosophy of despair.
Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of /Super flumina Babylonis/. Tears
filled my eyes. Any belated persons walking along the Boulevard
Bourdon must have stood still to listen to an exile's last prayer, a
last cry of regret for a lost name, mingled with memories of Bianca.
But gold soon gained the upper hand, the fatal passion quenched the
light of youth.
"I see it always," he said; "dreaming or waking, I see it; and as I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: recur; it will be equal to or greater than any part in which it is.
Certainly.
Then smallness will not be in anything, whether in a whole or in a part;
nor will there be anything small but actual smallness.
True.
Neither will greatness be in the one, for if greatness be in anything there
will be something greater other and besides greatness itself, namely, that
in which greatness is; and this too when the small itself is not there,
which the one, if it is great, must exceed; this, however, is impossible,
seeing that smallness is wholly absent.
True.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: Half a mile from that tent door--the father's despair,
The mother's deep anguish--the pride of the boy
In the father--the father's one hope and one joy
In the son:---the son now--wounded, dying! She told
Of the father's stern struggle with life: the boy's bold,
Pure, and beautiful nature: the fair life before him
If that life were but spared . . . yet a word might restore him!
The boy's broken love for the niece of Eugene!
Its pathos: the girl's love for him; how, half slain
In his tent, she had found him: won from him the tale;
Sought to nurse back his life; found her efforts still fail
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