| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: For what though the oven smoke? And what though I die ere morn?
There was I nourished and tended, and there was Taheia born."
Noon was high on the High-place, the second noon of the feast;
And heat and shameful slumber weighed on people and priest;
And the heart drudged slow in bodies heavy with monstrous meals;
And the senseless limbs were scattered abroad like spokes of wheels;
And crapulous women sat and stared at the stones anigh
With a bestial droop of the lip and a swinish rheum in the eye.
As about the dome of the bees in the time for the drones to fall,
The dead and the maimed are scattered, and lie, and stagger, and crawl;
So on the grades of the terrace, in the ardent eye of the day,
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on
which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not
a day on which one's heart is happy.
Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people
who laughed than for myself. Of course when they saw me I was not
on my pedestal, I was in the pillory. But it is a very
unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals.
A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific
reality. They should have known also how to interpret sorrow
better. I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It
were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: bedroom which is hardly ever used. Again and again have I asked
George to let me have it moved downstairs, but he won't hear of
it."
"Was it not placed here by Dame Alice herself?" I inquired a little
reproachfully, for I felt that Lucy was not treating the cabinet
with the respect which it really deserved.
"Yes, so they say," she answered; and the tone of light contempt in
which she spoke was now pierced by a not unnatural pride in the
romantic mysteries of her husband's family. "She placed it here,
and it is said, you know, that when the closed cabinet is opened,
and the mysterious motto is read, the curse will depart from the
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