| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: the lamplight. Mary rose up, and he looked into her eyes, and
his heart grew cold within him.
"Who is this woman?" he said at last. His voice was
dry and hoarse.
"That is the woman who Herbert married."
Clarke looked again at the sketch; it was not Mary
after all. There certainly was Mary's face, but there was
something else, something he had not seen on Mary's features
when the white-clad girl entered the laboratory with the doctor,
nor at her terrible awakening, nor when she lay grinning on the
bed. Whatever it was, the glance that came from those eyes,
The Great God Pan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: the service. 'Art,' he tells us, in words that still move many by
their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, 'Art touched her
renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were
purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated
with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.'
But Art was not the only cause of the change. 'The writings of
Wordsworth,' he goes on to say, 'did much towards calming the
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mutations. I wept
over them tears of happiness and gratitude.' He accordingly left
the army, with its rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-
tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-born
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: deity. Vocabularies are exhausted and languages altered in the
attempt to praise him enough; death is looked on as gain if it
attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being
his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted
kind of professional specialty within the tribe.[199] The legends
that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this
impulse to celebrate and glorify. The Buddha[200] and
Mohammed[201] and their companions and many Christian saints are
incrusted with a heavy jewelry of anecdotes which are meant to be
honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a
touching expression of man's misguided propensity to praise.
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