| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: studio. He sat, half dead, upon a chair, hardly daring to glance at a
statue of a woman, in which he recognized his own features. He did not
utter a word, but his teeth were chattering; he was paralyzed with
fear. Sarrasine was striding up and down the studio. Suddenly he
halted in front of Zambinella.
" 'Tell me the truth,' he said, in a changed and hollow voice. 'Are
you not a woman? Cardinal Cicognara----'
"Zambinella fell on his knees, and replied only by hanging his head.
" 'Ah! you are a woman!' cried the artist in a frenzy; 'for even a--'
"He did not finish the sentence.
" 'No,' he continued, 'even /he/ could not be so utterly base.'
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: that malignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on
the gold. Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design
of the work is perfectly clear at the first hearing as regards
all the themes; but it is so as regards most of them, the main
lines being laid down as emphatically and intelligibly as the
dramatic motives in a Shakespearean play. As to the coyer
subtleties of the score, their discovery provides fresh interest
for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian
inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.
The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped
on the memory easily by the simple association of the sound of
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: disease, consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the VALUE of
the fruits? Do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their
new doctrine of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us
to admire the productions of genius from now onwards? and say
outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth?
No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them
here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love
of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too
glad to draw. One disciple of the school, indeed, has striven to
impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way (such
works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to
|
