| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: knowing this theory of art as a theory.
"Yes," continued the old man vehemently, "you draw a woman, but you do
not SEE her. That is not the way to force an entrance into the arcana
of Nature. Your hand reproduces, without an action of your mind, the
model you copied under a master. You do not search out the secrets of
form, nor follow its windings and evolutions with enough love and
perseverance. Beauty is solemn and severe, and cannot be attained in
that way; we must wait and watch its times and seasons, and clasp it
firmly ere it yields to us. Form is a Proteus less easily captured,
more skilful to double and escape, than the Proteus of fable; it is
only at the cost of struggle that we compel it to come forth in its
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: promotion, too, came at last; but Fanny Harville did not live to know it.
She had died the preceding summer while he was at sea. Captain Wentworth
believed it impossible for man to be more attached to woman
than poor Benwick had been to Fanny Harville, or to be more deeply
afflicted under the dreadful change. He considered his disposition
as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings
with quiet, serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading,
and sedentary pursuits. To finish the interest of the story,
the friendship between him and the Harvilles seemed, if possible,
augmented by the event which closed all their views of alliance,
and Captain Benwick was now living with them entirely. Captain Harville
Persuasion |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: foot or two above water. In the daytime, I dare say, you might
make it out with a glass from your poop. I scrambled up on it and
rested myself for a bit. Then I made another start. That last
spell must have been over a mile."
His whisper was getting fainter and fainter, and all the time he
stared straight out through the port-hole, in which there was not
even a star to be seen. I had not interrupted him. There was
something that made comment impossible in his narrative, or perhaps
in himself; a sort of feeling, a quality, which I can't find a name
for. And when he ceased, all I found was a futile whisper: "So
you swam for our light?"
'Twixt Land & Sea |
