| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: even so, but the surgeon shall examine your wound and lay herbs
upon it to relieve your pain."
He then said to Talthybius, "Talthybius, tell Machaon, son to the
great physician, Aesculapius, to come and see Menelaus
immediately. Some Trojan or Lycian archer has wounded him with an
arrow to our dismay, and to his own great glory."
Talthybius did as he was told, and went about the host trying to
find Machaon. Presently he found standing amid the brave warriors
who had followed him from Tricca; thereon he went up to him and
said, "Son of Aesculapius, King Agamemnon says you are to come
and see Menelaus immediately. Some Trojan or Lycian archer has
 The Iliad |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: measure. The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly did
not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and
all that we secretly dreaded becoming.
But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant
so much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading
party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk
in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile
pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We
improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied
deep notes for the responses.
"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and
sudden death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by
Hamlet's humour with something of the surprise and justice of
comedy, is really not for such as they. They never die. Horatio,
who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the
unsatisfied,'
'Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'
dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo
and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life
has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes
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