| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: straw.[2]
[2] i.e. "with particles of straw and beards of corn blowing in one's
face."
Isch. And should you merely sever the ears at top, or reap close to
the ground?[3]
[3] See Holden ad loc.; Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, "Husbandry," 27 (ed.
1767), "In Somersetshire . . . they do share theyr wheate very
lowe. . . ."
If the stalk of corn were short (I answered), I should cut down close,
to secure a sufficient length of straw to be of use. But if the stalk
be tall, you would do right, I hold, to cut it half-way down, whereby
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that
I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want
to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is.
It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all
that it teaches one, is my new world.
I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and
sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as
far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of
imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had
no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole,
used often to quote to me Goethe's lines - written by Carlyle in a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or
dramatic career. Her tears were ready to flow for every misfortune;
she sang paeans for every victory. She sympathized with the fallen
Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali, massacring the foreign usurpers of
Egypt. In short, any kind of genius was accommodated with an aureole,
and she was fully persuaded that gifted immortals lived on incense and
light.
A good many people looked upon her as a harmless lunatic, but in these
extravagances of hers a keener observer surely would have seen the
broken fragments of a magnificent edifice that had crumbled into ruin
before it was completed, the stones of a heavenly Jerusalem--love, in
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