| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Salome by Oscar Wilde: en argent, et maintenant il s'est tue! Ah! n'a-t-il pas predit
qu'un malheur allait arriver? . . . Je l'ai predit moi-meme et il ut
arrive. Je savais bien que la lune cherchait un mort, mais je ne
savais pas que c'etait lui qu'elle cherchait. Ah! pourquoi ne l'ai-
je pas cache de la lune? Si je l'avais cache dans une caverne elle
ne l'aurait pas vu.
LE PREMIER SOLDAT. Princesse, le jeune capitaine vient de se tuer.
SALOME. Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche, Iokanaan.
IOKANAAN. N'avez-vous pas peur, fille d'Herodias? Ne vous ai-je
pas dit que j'avais entendu dans le palais le battement des ailes de
l'ange de la mort, et l'ange n'est-il pas venu?
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: him to perish at all. Stevie dead was a much greater nuisance than
ever he had been when alive. Mr Verloc had augured a favourable
issue to his enterprise, basing himself not on Stevie's
intelligence, which sometimes plays queer tricks with a man, but on
the blind docility and on the blind devotion of the boy. Though
not much of a psychologist, Mr Verloc had gauged the depth of
Stevie's fanaticism. He dared cherish the hope of Stevie walking
away from the walls of the Observatory as he had been instructed to
do, taking the way shown to him several times previously, and
rejoining his brother-in-law, the wise and good Mr Verloc, outside
the precincts of the park. Fifteen minutes ought to have been
The Secret Agent |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: abyss a Primaeval One. But even that has a predicate, for it is one; it
is not pure essence. Must there not be something beyond that again,
which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What
an abyss! How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, in
the vast nowhere between it and the object of its search? The search
after the One issues in a wail to the innumerable; and kind gods,
angels, and heroes, not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to
satisfy at least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have
done since, and may do again; and so, as Mr. Carlyle has it, "the
bottomless pit got roofed over," as it may be again ere long.
Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure? That Alexandria,
|
