| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: committed themselves to the woods and to the skies; the kid has
forsaken the teat, and learned by degrees to climb the rocks in
quest of independent sustenance. I only have made no advances, but
am still helpless and ignorant. The moon, by more than twenty
changes, admonished me of the flux of life; the stream that rolled
before my feet upbraided my inactivity. I sat feasting on
intellectual luxury, regardless alike of the examples of the earth
and the instructions of the planets. Twenty months are passed:
who shall restore them?"
These sorrowful meditations fastened upon his mind; he passed four
months in resolving to lose no more time in idle resolves, and was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his
own soul was already the soul of a king.
I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character
that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, 'Yes! this is
just where the artistic life leads a man!' Two of the most perfect
lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of
Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed
years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante;
the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which
seems coming out of Russia. And for the last seven or eight
months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus: only-begotten Son of God, `the blessed and only potentate, the
King of kings, and Lords of lords; who only hath immortality,
dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto'; who with
the Father and the Holy Ghost is glorified. I am not one of
those who proclaim from the house-top their wild rout of gods,
and worship lifeless and dumb idols, but one God do I acknowledge
and confess, in three persons glorified, the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost, but in one nature and substance, in one glory and
kingdom undivided. He then is in three persons one God, without
beginning, and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate,
immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible,
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