| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: deeply moving him.
"And Meyerbeer has given the devil a too prominent part. Bertram and
Alice represent the contest between right and wrong, the spirits of
good and evil. This antagonism offered a splendid opportunity to the
composer. The sweetest melodies, in juxtaposition with harsh and crude
strains, was the natural outcome of the form of the story; but in the
German composer's score the demons sing better than the saints. The
heavenly airs belie their origin, and when the composer abandons the
infernal motives he returns to them as soon as possible, fatigued with
the effort of keeping aloof from them. Melody, the golden thread that
ought never to be lost throughout so vast a plan, often vanishes from
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: Aristophanes in the Clouds, to have gone home to the sophists and
grammarians of the day.
For the age was very busy with philological speculation; and many questions
were beginning to be asked about language which were parallel to other
questions about justice, virtue, knowledge, and were illustrated in a
similar manner by the analogy of the arts. Was there a correctness in
words, and were they given by nature or convention? In the presocratic
philosophy mankind had been striving to attain an expression of their
ideas, and now they were beginning to ask themselves whether the expression
might not be distinguished from the idea? They were also seeking to
distinguish the parts of speech and to enquire into the relation of subject
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle. And this is what happens to most of
us. We are not effectively coerced to learn: we stave off punishment
as far as we can by lying and trickery and guessing and using our
wits; and when this does not suffice we scribble impositions, or
suffer extra imprisonments--"keeping in" was the phrase in my time--or
let a master strike us with a cane and fall back on our pride at being
able to hear it physically (he not being allowed to hit us too hard)
to outface the dishonor we should have been taught to die rather than
endure. And so idleness and worthlessness on the one hand and a
pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable routine. If my
schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating me instead of
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