| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: And the Priest beat his breast, and answered, 'Alack, alack, thou
art mad, or hast eaten of some poisonous herb, for the soul is the
noblest part of man, and was given to us by God that we should
nobly use it. There is no thing more precious than a human soul,
nor any earthly thing that can be weighed with it. It is worth all
the gold that is in the world, and is more precious than the rubies
of the kings. Therefore, my son, think not any more of this
matter, for it is a sin that may not be forgiven. And as for the
Sea-folk, they are lost, and they who would traffic with them are
lost also. They are as the beasts of the field that know not good
from evil, and for them the Lord has not died.'
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: him off, root and branch. It's as much as my life is worth to come
within six yards of him. The other day he nearly fractured my
skull for singing a pretty, inoffensive love-song, on purpose to
amuse him.'
'Oh, Gilbert! how could you?' exclaimed my mother.
'I told you to hold your noise first, you know, Fergus,' said I.
'Yes, but when I assured you it was no trouble and went on with the
next verse, thinking you might like it better, you clutched me by
the shoulder and dashed me away, right against the wall there, with
such force that I thought I had bitten my tongue in two, and
expected to see the place plastered with my brains; and when I put
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: pleasures of earth. The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth
that trembled beneath his feet. His was the last festival of the
reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds. The
devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he
had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom.
In a moment he had felt all that that enormous power could accomplish;
in a moment he had exercised it, proved it, wearied of it. What had
hitherto been the sum of human desires became as nothing. So often it
happens that with possession the vast poetry of desire must end, and
the thing possessed is seldom the thing that we dreamed of.
Beneath Melmoth's omnipotence lurked this tragical anticlimax of so
|
