| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: friends ready to launch him into the great world at the very moment
when that world was about to fall. Like other young men, he was at
first more attracted by glory and science than by the vanities of
life. He frequented the society of scientific men, particularly
Lavoisier, who at that time was better known to the world for his
enormous fortune as a "fermier-general" than for his discoveries in
chemistry,--though later the great chemist was to eclipse the man of
wealth.
Balthazar grew enamored of the science which Lavoisier cultivated, and
became his devoted disciple; but he was young, and handsome as
Helvetius, and before long the Parisian women taught him to distil wit
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: She smiled and we parted, she still as proud and as cruel, I as
ridiculous, as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young aide-
de-camp, and I was by turns angry, sulky, admiring, loving, and
jealous.
"Until to-morrow," she said to me, as she left the ball about two
o'clock in the morning.
"I won't go," I thought. "I give up. You are a thousand times more
capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination."
The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty
little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet,
looking up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: decencies and possibilities. It gives me a kind of detestation--"
She pulled up short.
Oh but he wanted to hear. "Detestation of what?"
"Of everything--of life."
"Ah that's too much," he laughed--"or too little!"
"Too little, precisely"--she was eager. "What I hate is myself--
when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the
lives of others, and that one isn't happy even then. One does it
to cheat one's self and to stop one's mouth--but that's only at the
best for a little. The wretched self is always there, always
making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is that it's
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