| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: about either. And if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as I
hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and walk, and live with
freedom.
Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into
the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at
length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die.
It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong,
terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so.
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment
on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness,
and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman
prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the
intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the
whole material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck
out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their notions
one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of
trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.
CHAPTER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
THE civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a
great extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man.
This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit
But we mark how he sees in everything
A law that, given we flout it once too often,
Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.
To me it looks as if the power that made him,
For fear of giving all things to one creature,
Left out the first, -- faith, innocence, illusion,
Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, --
And thereby, for his too consuming vision,
Empowered him out of nature; though to see him,
You'd never guess what's going on inside him.
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