| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: His argent forehead, like a rising moon
Over the dusky hills of meeting brows,
Is crescent shaped, the hot and Tyrian noon
Leads from the myrtle-grove no goodlier spouse
For Cytheraea, the first silky down
Fringes his blushing cheeks, and his young limbs are strong and
brown;
And he is rich, and fat and fleecy herds
Of bleating sheep upon his meadows lie,
And many an earthen bowl of yellow curds
Is in his homestead for the thievish fly
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as
much as the others. He detected a degrading quality in the touches
of age which every day adds to a human countenance. They moved and
disturbed him, like the signs of a horrible inward travail which
was frightfully apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his
isolation in Malata, where he had settled after five strenuous
years of adventure and exploration.
"It's a fact," he said, "that when I am at home in Malata I see no
one consciously. I take the plantation boys for granted."
"Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted. And
that's sanity."
Within the Tides |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: would have gone away unaffected?
Certainly, he said.
And the same may be said of the immortal: if the immortal is also
imperishable, the soul when attacked by death cannot perish; for the
preceding argument shows that the soul will not admit of death, or ever be
dead, any more than three or the odd number will admit of the even, or fire
or the heat in the fire, of the cold. Yet a person may say: 'But although
the odd will not become even at the approach of the even, why may not the
odd perish and the even take the place of the odd?' Now to him who makes
this objection, we cannot answer that the odd principle is imperishable;
for this has not been acknowledged, but if this had been acknowledged,
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