| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By
the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he
arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,
that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least--in the
circumstances then surrounding me--there arose out of the pure
abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his
canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt
I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too
concrete reveries of Fuseli.
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: and as she had taken what I felt to be an important
view of her condition, I did not, at first, press
the marriage, but agreed to assist her in trying to
devise some plan by which we might escape from
our unhappy condition, and then be married.
We thought of plan after plan, but they all
seemed crowded with insurmountable difficulties.
We knew it was unlawful for any public convey-
ance to take us as passengers, without our master's
consent. We were also perfectly aware of the
startling fact, that had we left without this consent
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: innovations, whether in art, science, or politics. Fate, or the
instincts of their mind which cannot fit into the compartments where
the trading class sit, providentially guides them to the spots where
they may find teaching. Led by my passion for music I wandered
throughout Italy from theatre to theatre, living on very little, as
men can live there. Sometimes I played the bass in an orchestra,
sometimes I was on the boards in the chorus, sometimes under them with
the carpenters. Thus I learned every kind of musical effect, studying
the tones of instruments and of the human voice, wherein they differed
and how they harmonized, listening to the score and applying the rules
taught me by my father.
Gambara |
