| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Is by itself condemned, what alchemy
Can teach me this? what herb Medea brewed
Will bring the unexultant peace of essence not subdued?
The minor chord which ends the harmony,
And for its answering brother waits in vain
Sobbing for incompleted melody,
Dies a swan's death; but I the heir of pain,
A silent Memnon with blank lidless eyes,
Wait for the light and music of those suns which never rise.
The quenched-out torch, the lonely cypress-gloom,
The little dust stored in the narrow urn,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: short, what with undertakers, imbalmers, joiners, sextons, and
your damn'd elegy hawkers, upon a late practitioner in physick
and astrology, I got not one wink of sleep that night, nor scarce
a moment's rest ever since. Now I doubt not but this villainous
'squire has the impudence to assert, that these are entirely
strangers to him; he, good man, knows nothing of the matter, and
honest Isaac Bickerstaff, I warrant you, is more a man of honour,
than to be an accomplice with a pack of rascals, that walk the
streets on nights, and disturb good people in their beds; but he
is out, if he thinks the whole world is blind; for there is one
John Partridge can smell a knave as far as Grubstreet, -- tho' he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: to a tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little,
that in the nature of things she would probably elect
to cling to someone else. But he loved life well enough
for even that event to give him a certain satisfaction,
apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.
After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his
loneliness, he hastened to accept a rather unprofitable
freight to Australia simply for the opportunity of seeing
his daughter in her own home. What made him dis-
satisfied there was not to see that she clung now to some-
body else, but that the prop she had selected seemed on
End of the Tether |
