| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: ferocious hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal
appetite, had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little
space I had seen frank and undisguised human nature under two
very different aspects, in such a sort that there was a certain
grotesque element in the very midst of a most terrible tragedy.
The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon
racked his brains to discover a reason for his niece's tears. The
lady's husband silently digested his dinner; content, apparently,
with the Countess' rather vague explanation, sent through the
maid, putting forward some feminine ailment as her excuse. We all
went early to bed.
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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: Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always
loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the
perfection of man. His primary desire was not to reform people,
any more than his primary desire was to a relieve suffering. To
turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his
aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid Society
and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of a
publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great
achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he
regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy
things and modes of perfection.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: none the less glorious though no man follow it - nay, by the
greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be quickened into
loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song. From the mean
squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the
idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with
fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun
and Bassarid dance there no more. Like Keats he may wander through
the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the
galley's deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since
passed away. But the drama is the meeting-place of art and life;
it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social
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