| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare: And there I stood amazed for a while,
As on a pillory, looking through the lute;
While she did call me rascal fiddler,
And twangling Jack, with twenty such vile terms,
As she had studied to misuse me so.
PETRUCHIO.
Now, by the world, it is a lusty wench!
I love her ten times more than e'er I did:
O! how I long to have some chat with her!
BAPTISTA.
[To HORTENSIO.] Well, go with me, and be not so discomfited;
The Taming of the Shrew |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled
for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple romantic charm of the
Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and
all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek;
it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and
dark house.
And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is
extremely probable that we have the actual terms, the IPSISSIMA
VERBA, used by Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked
in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But now we know that the
Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce: eat, solemnly declared that they were out of his reach.
The Penitent Thief
A BOY who had been taught by his Mother to steal grew to be a man
and was a professional public official. One day he was taken in
the act and condemned to die. While going to the place of
execution he passed his Mother and said to her:
"Behold your work! If you had not taught me to steal, I should not
have come to this."
"Indeed!" said the Mother. "And who, pray, taught you to be
detected?"
The Archer and the Eagle
Fantastic Fables |
