| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
The Waste Land |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: but wondering greatly at the boy's own, and especially at this
fresh reminder of something he had been conscious of from the first
- the strangest thing in his friend's large little composition, a
temper, a sensibility, even a private ideal, which made him as
privately disown the stuff his people were made of. Morgan had in
secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed
meanness; as well as a critical sense for the manners immediately
surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile
nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this nature
"old-fashioned," as the word is of children - quaint or wizened or
offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the tomb an
incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;
he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The
glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so
long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when
they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like
the executants who by their performance increase the power of
music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.
Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies
of such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day
almost forgotten, will survive in his special department without
|
