| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: the uninhabited wilderness, and left to perish there by hunger or
wild beasts. This was no uncommon method of disposing of the
Quakers, and they were accustomed to boast that the inhabitants
of the desert were more hospitable to them than civilized man.
"Fear not, little boy, you shall not need a mother, and a kind
one," said Dorothy, when she had gathered this information. "Dry
your tears, Ilbrahim, and be my child, as I will be your mother."
The good woman prepared the little bed, from which her own
children had successively been borne to another resting-place.
Before Ilbrahim would consent to occupy it, he knelt down, and as
Dorothy listened to his simple and affecting prayer, she
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he
is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of
his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to
impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He
is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of
the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of
cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which
he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he
knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly
is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the
sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Koran: charity before addressing him; that is better for you, and more
pure. But if ye find not the means,- then God is forgiving,
compassionate. What! do ye shrink from giving in charity before
addressing him? then if ye do it not, and God relents towards you,
then be steadfast in prayer, and give alms, and fear God and His
Apostle; for God is well aware of what ye do!
Dost thou not look at those who take for patrons a people God is
wrath with? they are neither of you nor of them, and they swear to you
a lie the while they know; for them God has prepared severe torment;
verily, evil is it they have done!
They take their faith for a cloak; and they turn men aside from
The Koran |
