| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: compact to word the Number which contains the infinite numbers whose
existence is revealed to you by thought? Ask it of the loftiest human
genius; he might ponder it for a thousand years and what would be his
answer? You know neither where Number begins, nor where it pauses, nor
where it ends. Here you call it Time, there you call it Space. Nothing
exists except by Number. Without it, all would be one and the same
substance; for Number alone differentiates and qualifies substance.
Number is to your Spirit what it is to Matter, an incomprehensible
agent. Will you make a Deity of it? Is it a being? Is it a breath
emanating from God to organize the material universe where nothing
obtains form except by the Divinity which is an effect of Number? The
Seraphita |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: Letter: TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE
HONOLULU, APRIL 6TH, 1889.
MY DEAR MISS BOODLE, - Nobody writes a better letter than my
Gamekeeper: so gay, so pleasant, so engagingly particular,
answering (by some delicate instinct) all the questions she
suggests. It is a shame you should get such a poor return as I can
make, from a mind essentially and originally incapable of the art
epistolary. I would let the paper-cutter take my place; but I am
sorry to say the little wooden seaman did after the manner of
seamen, and deserted in the Societies. The place he seems to have
stayed at - seems, for his absence was not observed till we were
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: and to hear him read the prayers with a firm, clear voice, while his
family and dependents knelt about him was a pleasure never to be
forgotten. . . . At five I was to drive round the park with the
Archbishop himself in his open carriage. This drive was most
charming. He explained everything, told me when such trees would be
felled, and when certain tracts of underwood would be fit for
cutting, how old the different-sized deer were--in short, the whole
economy of an English park. Every pretty point of view, too, he
made me see, and was as active and wide-awake as if he were thirty,
rather than ninety. . . . The next morning, after prayers and
breakfast, I took my leave.
|
