| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: She affected a severe headache to avoid replying to her cousin's
questions concerning the pictures; but on their return Madame Roguin
could not forbear from speaking to Madame Guillaume of the fame that
had fallen on the house of the Cat and Racket, and Augustine quaked in
every limb as she heard her mother say that she should go to the Salon
to see her house there. The young girl again declared herself
suffering, and obtained leave to go to bed.
"That is what comes of sight-seeing," exclaimed Monsieur Guillaume--"a
headache. And is it so very amusing to see in a picture what you can
see any day in your own street? Don't talk to me of your artists! Like
writers, they are a starveling crew. Why the devil need they choose my
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: which, in us, no doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to
them, sympathize, and magnify them by the power of the mind. Thus the
air must include a vast variety of molecules of various degrees of
elasticity, and capable of vibrating in as many different periods as
there are tones from all kinds of sonorous bodies; and these
molecules, set in motion by the musician and falling on our ear,
answer to our ideas, according to each man's temperament. I myself
believe that sound is identical in its nature with light. Sound is
light, perceived under another form; each acts through vibrations to
which man is sensitive and which he transforms, in the nervous
centres, into ideas.
 Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part
in life before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the
board, and stood by their bedside in the morning when they
woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought
and sold, or where they piped and wrestled, there would stand
some symbol of the things that are outside of man. These were
lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told
their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if
you will - but how harrowingly taught! - when the woman you
respect shall weep from your unkindness or blush with shame at
your misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted
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