| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: limits. The language of music is infinite; it includes everything; it
can express all things.
"Now do you see wherein lies the pre-eminence of the work you have
just heard? I can explain it in a few words. There are two kinds of
music: one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a
hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a
more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in. We
listen to their strains, their would-be melodies, with more or less
satisfaction, but absolutely nothing is left in our mind; by the end
of the century they are forgotten. But the nations, from the beginning
of time till our own day, have cherished as a precious treasure
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: that morning when Babalatchi, while visiting his fish baskets,
had his suspicions of the white man's daughter's love affair with
Dain confirmed beyond the shadow of doubt. Dain disappeared, and
Taminah's heart, where lay useless and barren the seeds of all
love and of all hate, the possibilities of all passions and of
all sacrifices, forgot its joys and its sufferings when deprived
of the help of the senses. Her half-formed, savage mind, the
slave of her body--as her body was the slave of another's
will--forgot the faint and vague image of the ideal that had
found its beginning in the physical promptings of her savage
nature. She dropped back into the torpor of her former life and
Almayer's Folly |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life among green trees
to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such being his
inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must
save off something; he determined to save off his livelihood.
"When a man has attained those things which are necessary to
life," he writes, "there is another alternative than to
obtain the superfluities; HE MAY ADVENTURE ON LIFE NOW, his
vacation from humbler toil having commenced." Thoreau would
get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and
necessary daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as
possible; and then, his vacation from humbler toil having
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