| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: who, if he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them
by without knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be
said: that our family system does unquestionably take the natural
bond between members of the same family, which, like all natural
bonds, is not too tight to be borne, and superimposes on it a painful
burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary
affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid of by
making relatives as independent of one another as possible.
The Fate of the Family
The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as confusing
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: covered her all round as low as the hips, like the
hair of a siren. And she had bewitched him. Fancy
a man who would guard his own life with the in-
flexibility of a pitiless and immovable fate, being
brought to lament that once a crowbar had missed
his skull! The sirens sing and lure to death, but
this one had been weeping silently as if for the pity
of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren
of this appalling navigator. He evidently wanted
to live his whole conception of life. Nothing else
would do. And she too was a servant of that life
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: in a letter of 1872, probably apropos of the "Alphabet."
In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karénina" this time, my
father wrote:
"You ask me whether you have understood my novel aright, and
what I think of your opinion. Of course you understood it aright.
Of course I am overjoyed at your understanding of it; but it does
not follow that everybody will understand it as you do."
But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to
Strakhof. He disliked critics on the whole and used to say that
the only people who took to criticism were those who had no
creative faculty of their own. "The stupid ones judge the clever
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