| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: self. For sufficient cause we can imagine courting death; we cannot
conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's,
still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he
grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable from
himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not
necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of
living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering
spirit's fate. But to part with the sense of self seems to be like
taking an eternal farewell of the soul. The Western mind shrinks
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: Not in this frequence can I lend full tongue,
O noble Ida, to those thoughts that wait
On you, their centre: let me say but this,
That many a famous man and woman, town
And landskip, have I heard of, after seen
The dwarfs of presage: though when known, there grew
Another kind of beauty in detail
Made them worth knowing; but in your I found
My boyish dream involved and dazzled down
And mastered, while that after-beauty makes
Such head from act to act, from hour to hour,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchess of Padua by Oscar Wilde: Had taken all the agonies to itself;
It seems it is not so.
GUIDO
O damned stars
Quench your vile cresset-lights in tears, and bid
The moon, your mistress, shine no more to-night.
DUCHESS
Guido, why are we here? I think this room
Is poorly furnished for a marriage chamber.
Let us get hence at once. Where are the horses?
We should be on our way to Venice now.
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