| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: prophecy was fulfilled. We must not be afraid of such a phrase.
Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for
every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.
Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy:
for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal,
either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. Christ found the
type and fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian poet, either at
Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in the long progress of the
centuries incarnate in him for whom the world was waiting.
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that
the Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at
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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: "Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which
the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth. These
discordant combinations, far from moving the listener, arouse in him a
feeling analogous to that which he would experience on seeing a rope-
dancer hanging to a thread and swaying between life and death. Never
does a soothing strain come in to mitigate the fatiguing suspense. It
really is as though the composer had had no other object in view than
to produce a baroque effect without troubling himself about musical
truth or unity, or about the capabilities of human voices which are
swamped by this flood of instrumental noise."
"Silence, my friend!" cried Gambara. "I am still under the spell of
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moran of the Lady Letty by Frank Norris: those cutthroat beach-combers with their knives and hatchets.
Maybe it's because you are so unlike my kind of girl that--that
things are as they are with me. I don't know. It's a queer
situation. A month or so ago I was at a tea in San Francisco, and
now I'm aboard a shark-fishing schooner sinking in Magdalena Bay;
and I'm with a girl that--that--that I--well, I'm with you, and,
well, you know how it is--I might as well say it--I love you more
than I imagined I ever could love a girl."
Moran's frown came back to her forehead.
"I don't like that kind of talk," she said; "I am not used to it,
and I don't know how to take it. Believe me," she said with a
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