| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bucolics by Virgil: Unhappy sheep, unhappy flock! while he
Still courts Neaera, fearing lest her choice
Should fall on me, this hireling shepherd here
Wrings hourly twice their udders, from the flock
Filching the life-juice, from the lambs their milk.
DAMOETAS
Hold! not so ready with your jeers at men!
We know who once, and in what shrine with you-
The he-goats looked aside- the light nymphs laughed-
MENALCAS
Ay, then, I warrant, when they saw me slash
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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: means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember
when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were
strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in
the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit
of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going
out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I
went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined
myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit
side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering,
tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: They've made them--their two friends, I mean--still cleverer
even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on!
Flora has now her grievance, and she'll work it to the end."
"Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?"
"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him
the lowest creature--!"
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face;
she looked for a minute as if she sharply saw them together.
"And him who thinks so well of you!"
"He has an odd way--it comes over me now," I laughed,"--of proving it!
But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of me."
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