| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: The spear that pierces and the side that bleeds,
The lips betraying and the life betrayed;
The deep hath calm: the moon hath rest: but we
Lords of the natural world are yet our own dread enemy.
Is this the end of all that primal force
Which, in its changes being still the same,
From eyeless Chaos cleft its upward course,
Through ravenous seas and whirling rocks and flame,
Till the suns met in heaven and began
Their cycles, and the morning stars sang, and the Word was Man!
Nay, nay, we are but crucified, and though
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: varies according to the practice of different schools, consisted at
Vendome of a certain number of lines to be written out in play hours.
Lambert and I were so overpowered with impositions, that we had not
six free days during the two years of our school friendship. But for
the books we took out of the library, which maintained some vitality
in our brains, this system of discipline would have reduced us to
idiotcy. Want of exercise is fatal to children. The habit of
preserving a dignified appearance, begun in tender infancy, has, it is
said, a visible effect on the constitution of royal personages when
the faults of such an education are not counteracted by the life of
the battle-field or the laborious sport of hunting. And if the laws of
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: CRITO: I will.
SOCRATES: Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or
that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is
doing wrong always evil and dishonorable, as I was just now saying, and as
has been already acknowledged by us? Are all our former admissions which
were made within a few days to be thrown away? And have we, at our age,
been earnestly discoursing with one another all our life long only to
discover that we are no better than children? Or, in spite of the opinion
of the many, and in spite of consequences whether better or worse, shall we
insist on the truth of what was then said, that injustice is always an evil
and dishonour to him who acts unjustly? Shall we say so or not?
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