| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never
been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as
weeds among stones. Hannah had been cold and stiff, indeed, at the
first: latterly she had begun to relent a little; and when she saw
me come in tidy and well-dressed, she even smiled.
"What, you have got up!" she said. "You are better, then. You may
sit you down in my chair on the hearthstone, if you will."
She pointed to the rocking-chair: I took it. She bustled about,
examining me every now and then with the corner of her eye. Turning
to me, as she took some loaves from the oven, she asked bluntly -
"Did you ever go a-begging afore you came here?"
Jane Eyre |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: intensify the belief in the other self. Less frequent but
uniform confirmation is to be found in echoes, which in Europe
within two centuries have been commonly interpreted as the
voices of mocking fiends or wood-nymphs, and which the savage
might well regard as the utterances of his other self.
[162] Note the fetichism wrapped up in the etymologies of
these Greek words. Catalepsy, katalhyis, a seizing of the body
by some spirit or demon, who holds it rigid. Ecstasy,
ekstasis, a displacement or removal of the soul from the body,
into which the demon enters and causes strange laughing,
crying, or contortions. It is not metaphor, but the literal
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The
absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a
height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong
Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it
would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.
Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in
Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the
whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world
is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more
than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer
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