| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: history, which, however, produced merely antiquarians, not
historians. It is so hard to use facts, so easy to accumulate
them.
Wearied of the dull monotony of the pontifical annals, which dwelt
on little else but the rise and fall in provisions and the eclipses
of the sun, Cato wrote out a history with his own hand for the
instruction of his child, to which he gave the name of Origines,
and before his time some aristocratic families had written
histories in Greek much in the same spirit in which the Germans of
the eighteenth century used French as the literary language. But
the first regular Roman historian is Sallust. Between the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: part about him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and
invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is
the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head, and such the
tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely
elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from
a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed New York
pilot-boat.
"Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty
of time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all,"
cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now;
give 'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently
loved, there the sweet maidenhood of 'The Golden Stair,' the
blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the 'Laus Amoris,' the
passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of
the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream.' And it has always been so. A
great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to
reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given
us. They brought their types with them, and Life with her keen
imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with models.
The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this,
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