| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: full: and suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesitation,
like a gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression
that makes us dream, almost a nightmare; but already it broadens
and widens anew, the old stream of delight-the most manifold
delight,--of old and new happiness; including ESPECIALLY the joy
of the artist in himself, which he refuses to conceal, his
astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients
here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested
expedients of art which he apparently betrays to us. All in all,
however, no beauty, no South, nothing of the delicate southern
clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance, hardly a will
Beyond Good and Evil |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: graceful in his bearing, with that something wild
as of a woodland creature in his aspect. Her moth-
er moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came
to see her on her day out. The father was surly,
but pretended not to know; and Mrs. Finn once
told her plainly that 'this man, my dear, will do
you some harm some day yet.' And so it went on.
They could be seen on the roads, she tramping stol-
idly in her finery--grey dress, black feather, stout
boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught
your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat
Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: nervous malady and a surgical disease. It is suffering multiplied by
infinitude. The body borders on the infinite through its nerves, as
the spirit does through thought. And, in fact, in the annals of the
Paris law courts the criminals who do not confess can be easily
counted.
This terrible situation, which in some cases assumes appalling
importance--in politics, for instance, when a dynasty or a state is
involved--will find a place in the HUMAN COMEDY. But here a
description of the stone box in which after the Restoration, the law
shut up a man condemned to death in Paris, may serve to give an idea
of the terrors of a felon's last day on earth.
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