| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. "I believe you would, Basil.
You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you
than a green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say."
The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak like that.
What had happened? He seemed quite angry. His face was flushed and his
cheeks burning.
"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your
silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me?
Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one
loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right.
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: 2. When the mother is found, we know what her children should be.
When one knows that he is his mother's child, and proceeds to guard
(the qualities of) the mother that belong to him, to the end of his
life he will be free from all peril.
3. Let him keep his mouth closed, and shut up the portals (of his
nostrils), and all his life he will be exempt from laborious exertion.
Let him keep his mouth open, and (spend his breath) in the promotion
of his affairs, and all his life there will be no safety for him.
4. The perception of what is small is (the secret of clear-
sightedness; the guarding of what is soft and tender is (the secret
of) strength.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: inveterate of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough,
was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death
gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most
live. It was as if, being nothing anywhere else for any one,
nothing even for himself, he were just everything here, and if not
for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witness but John
Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he could scan
like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his friend, and
there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life,
there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did
this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander
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