| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it
required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is
but one step, if as much as one.
Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I
go, and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can
discern something good for me. It will force on me the necessity
of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly
can. If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be
able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to
pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: the theories of Aristippus or Antisthenes respecting pleasure. Nor are we
able to say how far Plato in the Philebus conceives the finite and infinite
(which occur both in the fragments of Philolaus and in the Pythagorean
table of opposites) in the same manner as contemporary Pythagoreans.
There is little in the characters which is worthy of remark. The Socrates
of the Philebus is devoid of any touch of Socratic irony, though here, as
in the Phaedrus, he twice attributes the flow of his ideas to a sudden
inspiration. The interlocutor Protarchus, the son of Callias, who has been
a hearer of Gorgias, is supposed to begin as a disciple of the partisans of
pleasure, but is drawn over to the opposite side by the arguments of
Socrates. The instincts of ingenuous youth are easily induced to take the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum: add much to the load because he was stuffed with straw.
"You will notice I have one oat-field on my property," he remarked, as
they drove away. "Oat-straw is, I have found, the best of all straws
to re-stuff myself with when my interior gets musty or out of shape."
"Are you able to re-stuff yourself without help?" asked Aunt Em. "I
should think that after the straw was taken out of you there wouldn't
be anything left but your clothes."
"You are almost correct, madam," he answered. "My servants do the
stuffing, under my direction. For my head, in which are my excellent
brains, is a bag tied at the bottom. My face is neatly painted upon
one side of the bag, as you may see. My head does not need re-stuffing,
The Emerald City of Oz |
