| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor
later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had
it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I
want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it
the elements of life, of a new life, VITA NUOVA for me. Of all
things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by
surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost
all things, that one knows that one possesses it.
Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I
ought to do; in fact, must do. And when I use such a phrase as
that, I need not say that I am not alluding to any external
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: coat, swam up to him.
"A new arrival, I see!" said the Frog. "Well, after all there is
nothing like mud. Give me rainy weather and a ditch, and I am
quite happy. Do you think it will be a wet afternoon? I am sure I
hope so, but the sky is quite blue and cloudless. What a pity!"
"Ahem! ahem!" said the Rocket, and he began to cough.
"What a delightful voice you have!" cried the Frog. "Really it is
quite like a croak, and croaking is of course the most musical
sound in the world. You will hear our glee-club this evening. We
sit in the old duck pond close by the farmer's house, and as soon
as the moon rises we begin. It is so entrancing that everybody
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: per oram maritimam.
On the third page was a design which made Villiers
start and look up at Austin; he was gazing abstractedly out of
the window. Villiers turned page after page, absorbed, in spite
of himself, in the frightful Walpurgis Night of evil, strange
monstrous evil, that the dead artist had set forth in hard black
and white. The figures of Fauns and Satyrs and Aegipans danced
before his eyes, the darkness of the thicket, the dance on the
mountain-top, the scenes by lonely shores, in green vineyards,
by rocks and desert places, passed before him: a world before
which the human soul seemed to shrink back and shudder.
The Great God Pan |
