| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries.
Of course no one who was able, as we were able, to watch
the men of the revolution at close quarters could believe for
a moment that they were the mere paid agents of the very
power which more than all others represented the stronghold
they had set out to destroy. We had the knowledge of the
injustice being done to these men to urge us in their defence.
But there was more in it than that. There was the feeling,
from which we could never escape, of the creative effort of
the revolution. There was the thing that distinguishes the
creative from other artists, the living, vivifying expression of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: Looking at the marquis, surrounded by men who were bold enough,
fanatical enough, and sufficiently long-headed as to the future to
give battle to a victorious Republic in the hope of restoring a dead
monarchy, a proscribed religion, fugitive princes, and lost
privileges, "He," thought she, "has no less an aim than the others;
clinging to those fragments, he wants to make a future from the past."
Her mind, thus grasped by conflicting images, hesitated between the
new and the old wrecks. Her conscience told her that the one was
fighting for a man, the other for a country; but she had now reached,
through her feelings, the point to which reason will also bring us,
namely: to a recognition that the king /is/ the Nation.
The Chouans |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: intimate, with an elegy on the tragic event in their family. In
this piece he treats the mournful occasion of the bride's death
with mysterious solemnity.
The verses bear this title, "On the unexpected death of the
virtuous Lady Mrs. Janet Dalrymple, Lady Baldoon, younger," and
afford us the precise dates of the catastrophe, which could not
otherwise have been easily ascertained. "Nupta August 12.
Domum Ducta August 24. Obiit September 12. Sepult. September
30, 1669." The form of the elegy is a dialogue betwixt a
passenger and a domestic servant. The first, recollecting that
he had passed that way lately, and seen all around enlivened by
The Bride of Lammermoor |
