| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: VERBA, used by Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked
in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But now we know that the
Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were
bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse
all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never
liked the idea that we knew of Christ's own words only through a
translation of a translation. It is a delight to me to think that
as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have
listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato
understood him: that he really said [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], that when he thought of the lilies of the field and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most
wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to
mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a
glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long
arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest
of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within
reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable
token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the
billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck
still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this
poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And
yet - and yet - it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-
CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of
his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very
probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
not for individual experiences which differ from those of others
only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty
thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
