The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so,
it may be worth while going to prison.
There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there
are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of
sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into
squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird
call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were
Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The
unfortunate thing is that there have been none since. I make one
exception, St. Francis of Assisi. But then God had given him at
his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young had in
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: all day in the spring-house and turning pale every time she heard
his voice. It was that day, I think, that I found the
magazine with Upton Sinclair's article on fasting stuck fast in a
snow-drift, as if it had been thrown violently.
Wednesday afternoon Miss Julia Summers came with three lap robes,
a white lace veil and a French poodle in a sleigh and went to bed
in one of the best rooms, and that night we started to move out
furniture to the shelter-house.
By working almost all night we got the shelter-house fairly
furnished, although we made a trail through the snow that looked
like a fever chart. Toward daylight Mr. Sam dropped a wash-bowl
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting
to be real classy."
Even Mrs. Bogart.
Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's
house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a
Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to
be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha
bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N.
Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most
brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.
Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She
|