| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: return to beautiful and comely things, remembering that the art
which would represent the spirit of modern newspapers would be
exactly the art which you and I want to avoid - grotesque art,
malice mocking you from every gateway, slander sneering at you from
every corner.
Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the
workman. You have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your
somewhat imaginative newspapers as, if not a 'Japanese young man,'
at least a young man to whom the rush and clamour and reality of
the modern world were distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in
life was the difficulty of living up to the level of his blue china
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay: imagine I am so hard put to it that I have to hunt for lovers? Is
not Crimtyphon waiting for me at this very moment?"
"Very well. I am sorry to have hurt your feelings. Now carry the
temptation no farther - for it is a temptation, where a lovely woman
is concerned. I am not my own master."
"I'm not proposing anything so very hateful, am I? Why do you
humiliate me so?"
Maskull put his hands behind his back. "I repeat, I am not my own
master."
"Then who is your master?"
"Yesterday I saw Surtur, and from today I am serving him."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that
of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient,
fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and daughter, in
Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; and
finally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to the soul
of the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to
save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of death.
Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you if I
had time. I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legend
of Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and
show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and
|
