| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: be the scene of his operations. The lonely edifice was black and
bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip of the hill. It
had a square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement nor
pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance
with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round the
church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was
the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of
landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere
profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and
a very few memorial stones. Not a tree could exist up there:
nothing but the monotonous gray-green grass.
A Pair of Blue Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: Shelley and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also
is the most wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is
nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The
absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a
height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong
Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it
would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.
Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in
Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the
whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a
bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my
part to educate my fellow countrymen now. It is for no
particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it. I
simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw
and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace
the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man a
musket to shoot one with--the dollar is innocent--but I am
concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I
quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though
I will still make use and get what advantages of her I can,
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
