| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an
occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he /is/ sublime
through every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.
When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of
temper.
"I told you," he was saying, "to water the flowers from the rue
Massena to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely. You paid no
attention to me! /Sac-a-papier/! suppose the relations should take it
into their heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what
would they say to me? They'd shriek as if they were burned; they'd say
horrid things of us, and calumniate us--"
Ferragus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: First tried our soldiership! He did look far
Into the service of the time, and was
Discipled of the bravest: he lasted long;
But on us both did haggish age steal on,
And wore us out of act. It much repairs me
To talk of your good father. In his youth
He had the wit which I can well observe
To-day in our young lords; but they may jest
Till their own scorn return to them unnoted,
Ere they can hide their levity in honour
So like a courtier: contempt nor bitterness
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: statistics, now undeservedly forgotten, though they abound in
striking and profound observation.
But, as for France in those days, so for Italy to-day, the
statistics of succeeding years quickly proved that what official
optimism and national self-complacency spoke of as pessimism on
our part was but a conscientious inference from lamentable facts,
established in every country by the influence of civilisation on
crime, which I have described in preceding pages.
After these general statements we ought logically to watch the
periodic movement of each leading category of crimes and offences
in each division of the country; for not all crimes, nor all
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