| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: at six to make a water-colour sketch of the sunrise, she came to me
in profound indignation to say that she had met a man in his
pyjamas; no doubt; poor wretch, on his way to be shaved. I was
unable to convince her he was not expected to visit the barber in
all his clothes.
At the end of the third day she told me that she wished these people
wouldn't talk to her; she didn't like them. I had turned in the
hour we left the Channel and had not left my berth since, so
possibly I was not in the most amiable mood to receive a douche of
cold water. 'I must try to remember, dear,' I said, ' that you have
been brought up altogether in the society of pussies and vicars and
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But
this would hardly be the case with this foreigner, who was beginning
to think he might pay too dearly for his Paris education.
This personage was a Milanese of good family, exiled from his native
country, where some "liberal" pranks had made him an object of
suspicion to the Austrian Government. Count Andrea Marcosini had been
welcomed in Paris with the cordiality, essentially French, that a man
always finds there, when he has a pleasant wit, a sounding name, two
hundred thousand francs a year, and a prepossessing person. To such a
man banishment could but be a pleasure tour; his property was simply
sequestrated, and his friends let him know that after an absence of
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: of Nature. Your hand reproduces, without an action of your mind, the
model you copied under a master. You do not search out the secrets of
form, nor follow its windings and evolutions with enough love and
perseverance. Beauty is solemn and severe, and cannot be attained in
that way; we must wait and watch its times and seasons, and clasp it
firmly ere it yields to us. Form is a Proteus less easily captured,
more skilful to double and escape, than the Proteus of fable; it is
only at the cost of struggle that we compel it to come forth in its
true aspects. You young men are content with the first glimpse you get
of it; or, at any rate, with the second or the third. This is not the
spirit of the great warriors of art,--invincible powers, not misled by
|
