| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his hips, and his knees,
by helping himself on the rare projections of the stone, in the
right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need be;
an art which has rendered so celebrated and so alarming that corner
of the wall of the Conciergerie of Paris by which Battemolle,
condemned to death, made his escape twenty years ago.
Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he espied
the linden; it was about eighteen feet in height. The angle
which it formed with the gable of the large building was filled,
at its lower extremity, by a mass of masonry of a triangular shape,
probably intended to preserve that too convenient corner from
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: body which is in health requires neither medical nor any other aid, but is
well enough; and the healthy man has no love of the physician, because he
is in health.
He has none.
But the sick loves him, because he is sick?
Certainly.
And sickness is an evil, and the art of medicine a good and useful thing?
Yes.
But the human body, regarded as a body, is neither good nor evil?
True.
And the body is compelled by reason of disease to court and make friends of
Lysis |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting at
such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe. And the habit of
make-believe becomes at last so rooted that criticism of the
theatre insensibly ceases to be criticism at all, and becomes
more and more a chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the
only realities left on the stage: that is, the performers in
their own persons. In this phase the playwright who attempts to
revive genuine drama produces the disagreeable impression of the
pedant who attempts to start a serious discussion at a
fashionable at-home. Later on, when he has driven the tea
services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre
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