| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Prufrock/Other Observations |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: and a vanish, you see. You couldn't rightly call it a race. It
was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph
despatch. But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I
used to flush a comet occasionally that was something LIKE. WE
haven't got any such comets - ours don't begin. One night I was
swinging along at a good round gait, everything taut and trim, and
the wind in my favor - I judged I was going about a million miles a
minute - it might have been more, it couldn't have been less - when
I flushed a most uncommonly big one about three points off my
starboard bow. By his stern lights I judged he was bearing about
northeast-and-by-north-half-east. Well, it was so near my course
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous by Oscar Wilde: excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity has extended to all countries
where it is not prohibited. It is performed throughout Europe, Asia
and America. It is played even in Yiddish. This is remarkable in
view of the many dramas by French and German writers who treat of
the same theme. To none of them, however, is Wilde indebted.
Flaubert, Maeterlinck (some would add Ollendorff) and Scripture, are
the obvious sources on which he has freely drawn for what I do not
hesitate to call the most powerful and perfect of all his dramas.
But on such a point a trustee and executor may be prejudiced because
it is the most valuable asset in Wilde's literary estate. Aubrey
Beardsley's illustrations are too well known to need more than a
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