| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful
woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument.
She must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good.
I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good
deal myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire;
I shall not even object to her being too good for me;
she may be cleverer and wiser than I can understand, and I shall
only be the better pleased. I want to possess, in a word,
the best article in the market."
"Why didn't you tell a fellow all this at the outset?" Tristram demanded.
"I have been trying so to make you fond of ME!"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: pin-headed guinea-hens, always resentful of captivity,
ran screeching out into the tunnel and tried to poke their ugly,
painted faces through the snow walls. By five o'clock the chores
were done just when it was time to begin them all over again!
That was a strange, unnatural sort of day.
XIV
ON THE MORNING of the twenty-second I wakened with a start.
Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something
had happened. I heard excited voices in the kitchen--
grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost
beside herself. I looked forward to any new crisis with delight.
My Antonia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in
its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the
honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any
abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it
as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century -
still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is
incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem
affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out
to you the general ideas which characterise the great English
Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as
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