| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: rest.
It all sprang at bottom from the beauty of Mrs. Newsome's desire
that he should be worried with nothing that was not of the essence
of his task; by insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and
break she had so provided for his freedom that she would, as it
were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this point
indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might
have to thank herself FOR: the image, at best, of his own
likeness-poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by
the waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for
breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped. There he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: giver of the banquet. "There is but one eternal father, and, as
ill luck will have it, he is mine."
The seven Ferrarese, Don Juan's friends, the Prince himself, gave
a cry of horror. Two hundred years later, in the days of Louis
XV., people of taste would have laughed at this witticism. Or was
it, perhaps, that at the outset of an orgy there is a certain
unwonted lucidity of mind? Despite the taper light, the clamor of
the senses, the gleam of gold and silver, the fumes of wine, and
the exquisite beauty of the women, there may perhaps have been in
the depths of the revelers' hearts some struggling glimmer of
reverence for things divine and human, until it was drowned in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: etero, ta de krea apotithenai alsi pasas, k.t.l.}, "then when he
has been sacrificing to the gods, he will put away the salted
remains, and will himself dine out" (Jebb).
Or let a sick man be attended with a like solicitude by both. It is
plain, the kind attentions of the mighty potentate[9] arouse in the
patient's heart immense delight.[10]
[9] "Their mightinesses," or as we might say, "their serene
highnesses." Cf. Thuc. ii. 65.
[10] "The greatest jubilance."
Or say, they are the givers of two gifts which shall be like in all
respects. It is plain enough in this case also that "the gracious
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