| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: that nourished tufts of sickly herbage. These walls were the ruins of
the ramparts, under which ranged the gardens of several neighboring
houses.
The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large
hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere.
Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou,
Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber,
salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic
life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood
came, twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet's hair; there the farmers,
the cure, the under-prefect, and the miller's boy came on business.
Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: Affection, Family Life, etc. etc., which are no doubt very comforting
phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother's
influence and a father's care and so forth really come to in practice.
How many hours a week of the time when his children are out of bed
does the ordinary bread-winning father spend in the company of his
children or even in the same building with them? The home may be a
thieves' kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father a violent
drunkard; or the mother and father may be fashionable people who see
their children three or four times a year during the holidays, and
then not oftener than they can help, living meanwhile in daily and
intimate contact with their valets and lady's-maids, whose influence
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: that of a heroic man. It is not enough to remember Yoshida;
we must not forget the common soldier, nor Kusakabe, nor the
boy of eighteen, Nomura, of Choshu, whose eagerness betrayed
the plot. It is exhilarating to have lived in the same days
with these great-hearted gentlemen. Only a few miles from
us, to speak by the proportion of the universe, while I was
droning over my lessons, Yoshida was goading himself to be
wakeful with the stings of the mosquito; and while you were
grudging a penny income tax, Kusakabe was stepping to death
with a noble sentence on his lips.
CHAPTER VI - FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER
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