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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: races must turn rather to that strained self-consciousness of our
age which, as it is the key-note of all our romantic art, must be
the source of all or nearly all our culture. I mean that
intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century which is always
looking for the secret of the life that still lingers round old and
bygone forms of culture. It takes from each what is serviceable
for the modern spirit - from Athens its wonder without its worship,
from Venice its splendour without its sin. The same spirit is
always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting
what it owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and
to the palm-trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of
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