| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: amber, so let me call it, I will point it out to your own eyes. As
to the process, your share in it is so simple that you will ask me
why I seek aid from a chemist. The life-amber, when found, has but
to be subjected to heat and fermentation for six hours; it will be
placed in a small caldron which that coffer contains, over the fire
which that fuel will feed. To give effect to the process, certain
alkalies and other ingredients are required; but these are
prepared, and mine is the task to commingle them. From your
science as chemist I need and ask naught. In you I have sought
only the aid of a man."
"If that be so, why, indeed, seek me at all? Why not confide in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: certain ineffable symptoms of this fact which were visible to pure
spirits, to the eyes of the child whose innocence has known no breath
of evil passions, to the eyes of the old man who has lived to regain
his purity.
These signs revealed a Cain for whom there was still hope,--one who
seemed as though he were seeking absolution from the ends of the
earth. Minna suspected the galley-slave of glory in the man; Seraphita
recognized him. Both admired and both pitied him. Whence came their
prescience? Nothing could be more simple nor yet more extraordinary.
As soon as we seek to penetrate the secrets of Nature, where nothing
is secret, and where it is only necessary to have the eyes to see, we
Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence: kept him, and his love turned back into her, so that he could not
be free to go forward with his own life, really love another woman.
At this period, unknowingly, he resisted his mother's influence.
He did not tell her things; there was a distance between them.
Clara was happy, almost sure of him. She felt she had at last
got him for herself; and then again came the uncertainty. He told
her jestingly of the affair with her husband. Her colour came up,
her grey eyes flashed.
"That's him to a 'T'," she cried--"like a navvy! He's not fit
for mixing with decent folk."
"Yet you married him," he said.
Sons and Lovers |
