| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe
all of us want the same things--we're all together,
the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the
negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the
Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the classes that
have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a
more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and
dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be
individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next
generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests
and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, `Be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: life is inseparably bound up with the conception of a continual
striving after an unattainable ideal.
But even if we suppose the Christian ideal of perfect chastity
realized, what then? We should merely find ourselves face to
face on the one hand with the familiar teaching of religion, one
of whose dogmas is that the world will have an end; and on the
other of so-called science, which informs us that the sun is
gradually losing its heat, the result of which will in time be
the extinction of the human race.
Now there is not and cannot be such an institution as Christian
marriage, just as there cannot be such a thing as a Christian
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: going now.
MABEL CHILTERN. Just when I have come in! What dreadful manners you
have! I am sure you were very badly brought up.
LORD GORING. I was.
MABEL CHILTERN. I wish I had brought you up!
LORD GORING. I am so sorry you didn't.
MABEL CHILTERN. It is too late now, I suppose
LORD GORING. [Smiling.] I am not so sure.
MABEL CHILTERN. Will you ride to-morrow morning?
LORD GORING. Yes, at ten.
MABEL CHILTERN. Don't forget
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