| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of
penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a
power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never
detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through
them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I
watched, just as the dervish in the /Arabian Nights/ could pass into
any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.
If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven
o'clock and midnight on their way home from the Ambigu Comique, I used
to amuse myself by following them from the Boulevard du Pont aux Choux
to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The good folk would begin by talking
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou
art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than
a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom
that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY;
in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE
SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it
is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a
piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem
of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that
liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: get it into a better temper by a compliment. `I've been in many
gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.'
`Put your hand down, and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily.
`Then you'll know why.
Alice did so. `It's very hard,' she said, `but I don't see
what that has to do with it.'
`In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, `they make the beds
too soft--so that the flowers are always asleep.'
This sounded a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to
know it. `I never thought of that before!' she said.
`It's MY opinion that you never think AT ALL,' the Rose said in
Through the Looking-Glass |
