| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: a friend. When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one
simple as a child, as Christ said one should be.
It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they
die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act
of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme
individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.
People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or
ranked him as an altruist with the scientific and sentimental. But
he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he has, of course,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are now--or
were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort
of valley in front of us--but that is all. If I could
only see one mountain with snow on it----"
"Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come
to that," Thorpe insisted, with jocose perversity.
"You're on mountains yourself, all the time."
"You know what I mean," she retorted. "I want to see
something like the coloured pictures in the hotels."
"Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow,"
he said, for perhaps the twentieth time that day.
The Market-Place |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: the reception of new-comers. Moreover, Desroches having taken an
office where legal documents had never yet been scribbled, had bought
new tables, and white boxes edged with blue, also new. His staff was
made up of clerks coming from other officers, without mutual ties, and
surprised, as one may say, to find themselves together. Godeschal, who
had served his apprenticeship under Maitre Derville, was not the sort
of clerk to allow the precious tradition of the "welcome" to be lost.
This "welcome" is a breakfast which every neophyte must give to the
"ancients" of the office into which he enters.
Now, about the time when Oscar came to the office, during the first
six months of Desroches' installation, on a winter evening when the
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