| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the
survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the
moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.
Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have
been impossible: eating three-o'clock, after-dance suppers in
impossible cafis, talking of every side of life with an air half
of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement
that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he
never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities
between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.
Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and
This Side of Paradise |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: While noonday rages; and the goatherd leans
Upon his staff, and leaning watches them:
And as the swain, that lodges out all night
In quiet by his flock, lest beast of prey
Disperse them; even so all three abode,
I as a goat and as the shepherds they,
Close pent on either side by shelving rock.
A little glimpse of sky was seen above;
Yet by that little I beheld the stars
In magnitude and rustle shining forth
With more than wonted glory. As I lay,
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles: "Laius," she cried, and called her husband dead
Long, long ago; her thought was of that child
By him begot, the son by whom the sire
Was murdered and the mother left to breed
With her own seed, a monstrous progeny.
Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon
Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood,
Husband by husband, children by her child.
What happened after that I cannot tell,
Nor how the end befell, for with a shriek
Burst on us Oedipus; all eyes were fixed
Oedipus Trilogy |
