| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow
revealed to them.
I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true.
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.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: intense. The decks were scorching underfoot, the sun flamed
overhead, brazen, out of a brazen sky; the pitch bubbled in the
seams, and the brains in the brain-pan. And all the while the
excitement of the three adventurers glowed about their bones
like a fever. They whispered, and nodded, and pointed, and put
mouth to ear, with a singular instinct of secrecy, approaching
that island underhand like eavesdroppers and thieves; and even
Davis from the cross-trees gave his orders mostly by gestures.
The hands shared in this mute strain, like dogs, without
comprehending it; and through the roar of so many miles of
breakers, it was a silent ship that approached an empty island.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: this man and wife. For five years after I left the quarter, Mere
Vaillant used to come on my birthday with a bunch of flowers and some
oranges for me--she that had never a sixpence to put by! Want had
drawn us together. I never could give her more than a ten-franc piece,
and often I had to borrow the money for the occasion. This will
perhaps explain my promise to go to the wedding; I hoped to efface
myself in these poor people's merry-making.
The banquet and the ball were given on a first floor above a wineshop
in the Rue de Charenton. It was a large room, lighted by oil lamps
with tin reflectors. A row of wooden benches ran round the walls,
which were black with grime to the height of the tables. Here some
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