| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.
We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .
Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: the deck conversed in low tones; the followers of a small
Rajah from down the coast, broad-faced, simple young
fellows in white drawers and round white cotton caps
with their colored sarongs twisted across their bronze
shoulders, squatted on their hams on the hatch, chewing
betel with bright red mouths as if they had been tasting
blood. Their spears, lying piled up together within the
circle of their bare toes, resembled a casual bundle of
dry bamboos; a thin, livid Chinaman, with a bulky
package wrapped up in leaves already thrust under his
arm, gazed ahead eagerly; a wandering Kling rubbed
 End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: either priest or worker of miracles in this matter. He will not
even seek that 'sacred Heart of Greece,' Delphi, Apollo's shrine,
whose inspiration even Thucydides admitted and before whose wisdom
Socrates bowed. How foolish, he says, were the man who on this
matter would pray to God. We must search for the rational causes,
and the causes are seen to be clear, and the method of prevention
also. He then proceeds to notice how all this arose from the
general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense of
educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and
avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational
principles the whole of this apparently supernatural judgment.
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