| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: his cuffs with convulsive haste, slipped his thumb through the palette
charged with prismatic colors, and snatched, rather than took, the
handful of brushes which Porbus held out to him. As he did so his
beard, cut to a point, seemed to quiver with the eagerness of an
incontinent fancy; and while he filled his brush he muttered between
his teeth:--
"Colors fit to fling out of the window with the man who ground them,--
crude, false, revolting! who can paint with them?"
Then he dipped the point of his brush with feverish haste into the
various tints, running through the whole scale with more rapidity than
the organist of a cathedral runs up the gamut of the "O Filii" at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: Attic, and you will see better that the name heros is only a slight
alteration of Eros, from whom the heroes sprang: either this is the
meaning, or, if not this, then they must have been skilful as rhetoricians
and dialecticians, and able to put the question (erotan), for eirein is
equivalent to legein. And therefore, as I was saying, in the Attic dialect
the heroes turn out to be rhetoricians and questioners. All this is easy
enough; the noble breed of heroes are a tribe of sophists and rhetors. But
can you tell me why men are called anthropoi?--that is more difficult.
HERMOGENES: No, I cannot; and I would not try even if I could, because I
think that you are the more likely to succeed.
SOCRATES: That is to say, you trust to the inspiration of Euthyphro.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: department of a small-town store. That broad, gracious breast
had been planned as a resting-place for heads in need of comfort.
Those plump, firm arms were meant to enfold the weak and
distressed. Those capable hands should have smoothed troubled
heads and patted plump cheeks, instead of wasting their gifts in
folding piles of petticoats and deftly twitching a plait or a
tuck into place. She was playing Rosalind in buskins when she
should have been cast for the Nurse.
She entered Emma McChesney's office, now, in her quiet blue suit
and her neat hat, and she looked very sane and cheerful and
rosy-cheeked and dependable. At least, so Emma McChesney
Emma McChesney & Co. |
