| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: slow sounds, which appear to be high and low, and are sometimes discordant
on account of their inequality, and then again harmonical on account of the
equality of the motion which they excite in us. For when the motions of
the antecedent swifter sounds begin to pause and the two are equalized, the
slower sounds overtake the swifter and then propel them. When they
overtake them they do not intrude a new and discordant motion, but
introduce the beginnings of a slower, which answers to the swifter as it
dies away, thus producing a single mixed expression out of high and low,
whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise
becomes a higher sort of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in
mortal motions. Moreover, as to the flowing of water, the fall of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together.
For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I think I
have altered."
"You have not yet told me what your good action was.
Or did you say you had done more than one?" asked his companion
as he spilled into his plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded
strawberries and, through a perforated, shell-shaped spoon,
snowed white sugar upon them.
"I can tell you, Harry. It is not a story I could tell to any one else.
I spared somebody. It sounds vain, but you understand what I mean.
She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane. I think it was
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: clay and lime, no longer looked new.
"What brings you here, pray?" demanded Miss Wilson.
"I was led into the belief that you sent for me, lady," he
replied. "The baker's lad told me so as he passed my 'umble cot
this morning. I thought he were incapable of deceit."
"That is quite right; I did send for you. But why did you not go
round to the servants' hall?"
"I am at present in search of it, lady. I were looking for it
when this ball cotch me here " (touching his eye). "A cruel blow
on the hi' nat'rally spires its vision and expression and makes a
honest man look like a thief."
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