| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: on its absolute perfection of action depends the movement of the whole
mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express what seems to
me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as humanity and human
societies pass on slowly from their present barbarous and semi-savage
condition in matters of sex into a higher, it will be found increasingly,
that over and above its function in producing and sending onward the
physical stream of life (a function which humanity shares with the most
lowly animal and vegetable forms of life, and which even by some noted
thinkers of the present day seems to be regarded as its only possible
function,) that sex and the sexual relation between man and woman have
distinct aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual functions and ends, apart
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: he expressed it) and since then had not been herself. And now he
had brought her fourteen hundred versts and she was waiting in
the hostelry till Father Sergius should give orders to bring her.
She did not go out during the day, being afraid of the light, and
could only come after sunset.
'Is she very weak?' asked Father Sergius.
'No, she has no particular weakness. She is quite plump, and is
only "nerastenic" the doctors say. If you will only let me bring
her this evening, Father Sergius, I'll fly like a spirit to fetch
her. Holy Father! Revive a parent's heart, restore his line,
save his afflicted daughter by your prayers!' And the merchant
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit
side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering,
tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse
that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-
abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head,
the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its
own drink puts gall:- all these were things of which I was afraid.
And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to
taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season,
indeed, no other food at all.
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