| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: himself, or whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle - I see
the continual assertion of the imagination as the basis of all
spiritual and material life, I see also that to Christ imagination
was simply a form of love, and that to him love was lord in the
fullest meaning of the phrase. Some six weeks ago I was allowed by
the doctor to have white bread to eat instead of the coarse black
or brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It is a great delicacy.
It will sound strange that dry bread could possibly be a delicacy
to any one. To me it is so much so that at the close of each meal
I carefully eat whatever crumbs may be left on my tin plate, or
have fallen on the rough towel that one uses as a cloth so as not
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: would have been a happier one--the firm belief that all pure science
was a revelation from God; that it was not to be obtained at second
or third hand, by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or
Hippocrates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic
philosophers round him did) in the place of God: but by going
straight to nature at first hand, and listening to what Bacon calls
"the voice of God revealed in facts." True and noble is the passage
with which he begins his "Labyrinthus Medicorum," one of his attacks
on the false science of his day,
"The first and highest book of all healing," he says, "is called
wisdom, and without that book no man will carry out anything good or
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: She looked about the drawing-room with an expression of minute
scrutiny. "I saw a streak of light under one of the blinds as I
drove up: it's extraordinary that I can never teach that woman to
draw them down evenly."
Having corrected the irregularity, she seated herself on one of
the glossy purple arm-chairs; Mrs. Peniston always sat on a
chair, never in it.
Then she turned her glance to Miss Bart. "My dear, you look
tired; I suppose it's the excitement of the wedding. Cornelia Van
Alstyne was full of it: Molly was there, and Gerty Farish ran in
for a minute to tell us about it. I think it was odd, their
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