| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years,
Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife,
Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.
THE POET'S LOVE-SONG
In noon-tide hours, O Love, secure and strong,
I need thee not; mad dreams are mine to bind
The world to my desire, and hold the wind
A voiceless captive to my conquering song.
I need thee not, I am content with these:
Keep silence in thy soul, beyond the seas!
But in the desolate hour of midnight, when
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: 'Thou art the best of the witches,' cried the young Fisherman, 'and
I will surely dance with thee to-night on the top of the mountain.
I would indeed that thou hadst asked of me either gold or silver.
But such as thy price is thou shalt have it, for it is but a little
thing.' And he doffed his cap to her, and bent his head low, and
ran back to the town filled with a great joy.
And the Witch watched him as he went, and when he had passed from
her sight she entered her cave, and having taken a mirror from a
box of carved cedarwood, she set it up on a frame, and burned
vervain on lighted charcoal before it, and peered through the coils
of the smoke. And after a time she clenched her hands in anger.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish,
that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be
ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely
spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if
you like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for
despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end
in themselves. The rest is our affair--the laughter, the tears,
the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a
steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that's
our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every
phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may
Some Reminiscences |
