| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: The brow of the upland overtops the square
tower of the Colebrook Church. The slope is
green and looped by a white road. Ascending
along this road, you open a valley broad and shal-
low, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges
merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
flowing lines closing the view.
In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook
and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen
miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Symposium by Xenophon: Plat. "Protag." 309 B; "Il." xxiv. 348; "Od." x. 279.
[38] Cf. Pind. "Pyth." x. 75.
[39] See "Cyrop." I. iv. 28; Shakesp. "Ven. and Ad." 89: "But when her
lips were ready for his pay, he winks, and turns his lips another
way."
[40] Or, "a kiss which is to passion as dry combustious matter is to
fire," Shakesp. ib. 1162.
[41] Or, "is namesake of the love within the soul of lovers." The
whole passage, involving a play on the words {philein
phileisthai}, "where kisses rain without, love reigns within," is
probably to be regarded as a gloss. Cf. "Mem." I. iii. 13.
The Symposium |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: towards women?
"Beauvoir never fully explained this rather obscure episode of the
story; it is at least certain that the commandant thought himself
justified in treating his prisoner with excessive severity. Beauvoir
was placed in the dungeon, fed on black bread and cold water, and
fettered in accordance with the time-honored traditions of the
treatment lavished on captives. His cell, under the fortress-yard, was
vaulted with hard stone, the walls were of desperate thickness; the
tower overlooked the precipice.
"When the luckless man had convinced himself of the impossibility of
escape, he fell into those day-dreams which are at once the comfort
The Muse of the Department |
