| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: content himself with setting the man to work again on
mantelpieces and other decorative stone-work for use in house
property on the Trefusis estate. In a year or two his liberal
payments enabled the mason to save sufficient to start as an
employer, in which capacity he soon began to grow rich, as he
knew by experience exactly how much his workmen could be forced
to do, and how little they could be forced to take. Shortly after
this change in his circumstances he became an advocate of thrift,
temperance, and steady industry, and quitted the International
Association, of which he had been an enthusiastic supporter when
dependent on his own skill and taste as a working mason.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for his clothes; the
terrible death by which he gave the world its most eternal symbol;
and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his body swathed
in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though he had
been a king's son. When one contemplates all this from the point
of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme
office of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without
the shedding of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of
dialogue and costume and gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord;
and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember
that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: houses and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel
bell on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday,
as we drew up at one green town after another, with the
townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to see the
strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and
great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by
our mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and
the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or
to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the
mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a
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