| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: which has nothing to do with sexual passion. It might, and in
fact does exist in the absence of any sexual interest whatever.
The words mercy and kindness connote it less ambiguously than the
word love. But Wagner sought always for some point of contact
between his ideas and the physical senses, so that people might
not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century fashion,
but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and feel
them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on
common-sense concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he
insists on the need for sensuous apprehension to give reality to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: "Prove it to me," said the bottle-dealer, "and I double my daughter's
'dot,' for if it is so, you are Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Gerard
Douw!"
"And Magus is a famous picture-dealer!" said the painter, who now saw
the meaning of the misty and aged look imparted to his pictures in
Elie's shop, and the utility of the subjects the picture-dealer had
required of him.
Far from losing the esteem of his admiring bottle-merchant, Monsieur
de Fougeres (for so the family persisted in calling Pierre Grassou)
advanced so much that when the portraits were finished he presented
them gratuitously to his father-in-law, his mother-in-law and his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes.
We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring.
The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance.
The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a
benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex
marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded
rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.
Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches,
became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach
of the sun.
And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low,
Heart of Darkness |
