| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: "Now," said the woman, breaking the silence, so that her low
dry voice sounded quite loud, "before you go further,
Michael, listen to me. If you touch that money, I and this
girl go with the man. Mind, it is a joke no longer."
"A joke? Of course it is not a joke!" shouted her husband,
his resentment rising at her suggestion. "I take the money;
the sailor takes you. That's plain enough. It has been
done elsewhere--and why not here?"
"'Tis quite on the understanding that the young woman is
willing," said the sailor blandly. "I wouldn't hurt her
feelings for the world."
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: assumed a crystallised though sombre appearance; mica was more
closely mingled with the feldspar and quartz to form the proper rocky
foundations of the earth, which bears without distortion or crushing
the weight of the four terrestrial systems. We were immured within
prison walls of granite.
It was eight in the evening. No signs of water had yet appeared. I
was suffering horribly. My uncle strode on. He refused to stop. He
was listening anxiously for the murmur of distant springs. But, no,
there was dead silence.
And now my limbs were failing beneath me. I resisted pain and
torture, that I might not stop my uncle, which would have driven him
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: and the mystery of its vision. For what, as Goethe said, is the
study of the ancients but a return to the real world (for that is
what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is mediaevalism but
individuality?
It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its
sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the
adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of
the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century
in England, as from the marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang
the beautiful boy Euphorion.
Such expressions as 'classical' and 'romantic' are, it is true,
|
