| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: making a very deep gulf or bay between those two points of
Winterton and the Spurn Head; so that the ships going north are
obliged to stretch away to sea from Wintertonness, and leaving the
sight of land in that deep bay which I have mentioned, that reaches
to Lynn and the shore of Lincolnshire, they go, I say, N. or still
NNW. to meet the shore of Holderness, which I said runs out into
the sea again at the Spurn; and the first land they make or desire
to make, is called as above, Flamborough Head, so that
Wintertonness and Flamborough Head are the two extremes of this
course, there is, as I said, the Spurn Head indeed between; but as
it lies too far in towards the Humber, they keep out to the north
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: lateral pencils of light, are convex at their upper ends and must act by
convergence; and at their lower ends there seems to be an imperfect
vitreous substance. With these facts, here far too briefly and imperfectly
given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of
living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living
animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no
very great difficulty (not more than in the case of many other structures)
in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of
an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested by transparent
membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any
member of the great Articulate class.
On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: that the feuilletons take no notice of his pictures. But he still
works on; he aims for the Academy, where, undoubtedly, he will enter.
And--oh! vengeance which dilates his heart!--he buys the pictures of
celebrated artists who are pinched for means, and he substitutes these
true works of arts that are not his own for the wretched daubs in the
collection at Ville d'Avray.
There are many mediocrities more aggressive and more mischievous than
that of Pierre Grassou, who is, moreover, anonymously benevolent and
truly obliging.
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
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