| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: of almost heraldic oddity. Nothing could exceed her enthusiasm
over her capture, and nothing could exceed the confused
apprehensions it excited in me. I had an instinctive fear of her
which I tried without effect to conceal from her victim, but which
I let her notice with perfect impunity. Paraday heeded it, but she
never did, for her conscience was that of a romping child. She was
a blind violent force to which I could attach no more idea of
responsibility than to the creaking of a sign in the wind. It was
difficult to say what she conduced to but circulation. She was
constructed of steel and leather, and all I asked of her for our
tractable friend was not to do him to death. He had consented for
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not
cultivate it. As Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to
have an exclusively dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner
compared with Mendelssohn. On the other hand, he had not to go to
third rate literary hacks for "librettos" to set to music: he
produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity
to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony
(except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble
feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner
added thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest
opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: were lulls in which the silence seemed to be a thing of stifling.
encroaching substance--a thing that enveloped, buried the desert.
Judged by the great average of ideals and conventional standards
of life, Dick Gale was a starved, lonely, suffering, miserable
wretch. But in his case the judgment would have hit only externals,
would have missed the vital inner truth. For Gale was happy with
a kind of strange, wild glory in the privations, the pains, the perils,
and the silence and solitude to be endured on this desert land.
In the past he had not been of any use to himself or others;
and he had never know what it meant to be hungry, cold, tired,
lonely. He had never worked for anything. The needs of the day
Desert Gold |
