| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: eating a dish which he had prepared for himself during her absence.
After the Polish refugees, came Colmiche, an old man who was credited
with having committed frightful misdeeds in '93. He lived near the
river in the ruins of a pig-sty. The urchins peeped at him through the
cracks in the walls and threw stones that fell on his miserable bed,
where he lay gasping with catarrh, with long hair, inflamed eyelids,
and a tumour as big as his head on one arm.
She got him some linen, tried to clean his hovel and dreamed of
installing him in the bake-house without his being in Madame's way.
When the cancer broke, she dressed it every day; sometimes she brought
him some cake and placed him in the sun on a bundle of hay; and the
A Simple Soul |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief Constitutional
term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of
the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution,
the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied,
if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.
It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision
in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all
the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will
endure forever--it being impossible to destroy it except by some action
not provided for in the instrument itself.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: weight of the ripe fruit. He shook some of it down. When he tasted
this unhoped-for manna, he felt sure that the palms had been
cultivated by a former inhabitant--the savory, fresh meat of the dates
were proof of the care of his predecessor. He passed suddenly from
dark despair to an almost insane joy. He went up again to the top of
the hill, and spent the rest of the day in cutting down one of the
sterile palm trees, which the night before had served him for shelter.
A vague memory made him think of the animals of the desert; and in
case they might come to drink at the spring, visible from the base of
the rocks but lost further down, he resolved to guard himself from
their visits by placing a barrier at the entrance of his hermitage.
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