| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents as I had done -
he would clap his hands over new lights and see them blown out by
the wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told him, but
the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic
character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had
Shakespeare's own word for his being cryptic he would at once have
accepted it. The case there was altogether different - we had
nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks. I returned that I was
stupefied to see him attach such importance even to the word of Mr.
Vereker. He wanted thereupon to know if I treated Mr. Vereker's
word as a lie. I wasn't perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: of rare relief from observation and of the schoolroom
table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself
to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart.
There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested on
the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head;
but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that,
in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted.
Then it was--with the very act of its announcing itself--
that her identity flared up in a change of posture.
She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable
grand melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: When he had thus spoken they charged full weight upon the Danaans
with their spears held out before them, and the hopes of each ran
high that he should force Ajax son of Telamon to yield up the
body--fools that they were, for he was about to take the lives of
many. Then Ajax said to Menelaus, "My good friend Menelaus, you
and I shall hardly come out of this fight alive. I am less
concerned for the body of Patroclus, who will shortly become meat
for the dogs and vultures of Troy, than for the safety of my own
head and yours. Hector has wrapped us round in a storm of battle
from every quarter, and our destruction seems now certain. Call
then upon the princes of the Danaans if there is any who can hear
The Iliad |
