| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are
placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man
whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a
member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent
solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably
succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment.
Those who want a mask have to wear it.
But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those
dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose
desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are
going. They can't know. In one sense of the word it is of course
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea
and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass,
of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her
interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. "I
shouldn't care if you did!" he laughed, however; "and it's only a
figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. NOT to have followed
my perverse young course - and almost in the teeth of my father's
curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,' from
that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to
have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with
such an abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came
from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment
I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables
which I would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had
possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I
was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been
attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had
uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next
moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the
solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full
mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead.
Herbert West: Reanimator |
