| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: this penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian
luxury had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on
Dinah's life. Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now
understand how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist,
up to his ears in the literary environment, could laugh about his
Baroness with his friends and even with Madame Schontz. To such
readers as regard such things as utterly mean, it is almost useless to
make excuses which they will not accept.
"What did you do at Sancerre?" asked Bixiou the first time he met
Lousteau.
"I did good service to three worthy provincials--a Receiver-General of
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: Yes, he said, I entirely agree and go along with you in that.
And now, he said, let us begin again; and do not you answer my question in
the words in which I ask it: let me have not the old safe answer of which
I spoke at first, but another equally safe, of which the truth will be
inferred by you from what has been just said. I mean that if any one asks
you 'what that is, of which the inherence makes the body hot,' you will
reply not heat (this is what I call the safe and stupid answer), but fire,
a far superior answer, which we are now in a condition to give. Or if any
one asks you 'why a body is diseased,' you will not say from disease, but
from fever; and instead of saying that oddness is the cause of odd numbers,
you will say that the monad is the cause of them: and so of things in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: fearless. And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a
stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were
popular behind portrait Dianas in eighteenth century paintings.
Did she believe that all be had taught her, all the life he led
was--what was her phrase?--a kind of magic world, not really
real?
He groaned and turned over and repeated the words:
"A kind of magic world--not really real!"
The wind blew through the door she opened, and scattered
everything in the room. And still she held the door open.
He was astonished at himself. He started up in swift
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