| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: but by reason of the lustre of virtues shed forth upon the life of
man, that increase is given to things beautiful and good."[38]
[37] "By reason of the flower on the damask cheek."
[38] Al. "For growth is added to things 'beautiful and good,' not
through the bloom of youth but virtuous perfections, an increase
coextensive with the life of man." See Breit. ad loc.
That, Socrates, or something like that, as far as I may trust my
memory, records the earliest conversation which I held with her.
VIII
And did you happen to observe, Ischomachus (I asked), whether, as the
result of what was said, your wife was stirred at all to greater
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: Madame Firmiani acknowledged to twenty-five. But the Practicals proved
that having married the invisible Firmiani (then a highly respectable
individual in the forties) in 1813, at the age of sixteen, she must be
at least twenty-eight in 1825. However the same persons also asserted
that at no period of her life had she ever been so desirable or so
completely a woman. She was now at an age when women are most prone to
conceive a passion, and to desire it, perhaps, in their pensive hours.
She possessed all that earth sells, all that it lends, all that it
gives. The Attaches declared there was nothing of which she was
ignorant; the Contradictors asserted that there was much she ought to
learn; the Observers remarked that her hands were white, her feet
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: water that shakes with a stream of gold in the dark, she would ask:
"Why do I like this so?"
Always something in his breast shrank from these close,
intimate, dazzled looks of hers.
"Why DO you?" he asked.
"I don't know. It seems so true."
"It's because--it's because there is scarcely any shadow in it;
it's more shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm
in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape.
That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living.
The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really."
Sons and Lovers |
