| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come
in contact with his personality, even though they may neither bow
to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the
ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow
revealed to them.
I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true.
Shelley and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also
is the most wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is
nothing in the entire cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The
absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a
height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite
frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition - absolutely
unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his
resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated
absence of three nights - of his being definitely followed, tracked
at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should
the less confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to
pursue. It worried, it finally quite broke him up, for it proved,
of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his
book. He was kept in sight while remaining himself - as regards
the essence of his position - sightless, and his only recourse then
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: again, but he did not brighten up proportionately. It seemed
Heemskirk had taken special pains to make himself disagreeable.
The lieutenant had frightened old Nelson very much by expressing a
sinister wonder at the Government permitting a white man to settle
down in that part at all. "It is against our declared policy," he
had remarked. He had also charged him with being in reality no
better than an Englishman. He had even tried to pick a quarrel
with him for not learning to speak Dutch.
"I told him I was too old to learn now," sighed out old Nelson (or
Nielsen) dismally. "He said I ought to have learned Dutch long
before. I had been making my living in Dutch dependencies. It was
'Twixt Land & Sea |
