| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: an expression of the sense of my more than questionable privilege,
of which the very breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest
of human charities.
What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we
thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that,
in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden.
I knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was
capable of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time
to be wholly sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep
terms with so compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--
quite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: comedian who fulfilled his duties in a pious manner and wore a hair
shirt, we must suppose that an actor's life did not demand this
incessant activity. Sometimes Florine, seized with a bourgeois desire
to get out into the country and gather flowers, pretends to the
manager that she is ill.
But even these mechanical operations are nothing in comparison with
the intrigues to be carried on, the pains of wounded vanity to be
endured,--preferences shown by authors, parts taken away or given to
others, exactions of the male actors, spite of rivals, naggings of the
stage manager, struggles with journalists; all of which require
another twelve hours to the day. But even so far, nothing has been
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form
of which "faith" comes to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness
as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense
for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an
antique taste by the paradox of the formula, "God on the Cross".
Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in
inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and
questionable as this formula: it promised a transvaluation of all
ancient values--It was the Orient, the PROFOUND Orient, it was
the Oriental slave who thus took revenge on Rome and its noble,
light-minded toleration, on the Roman "Catholicism" of non-faith,
Beyond Good and Evil |
