| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: which, with a couple of chairs and a couple of stools, completed the
furniture. The stock of fuel was kept under the stove with a funnel-
shaped chimney, and in a corner stood the wash-tub in which the family
linen lay, often steeping over-night in soapsuds. The nursery ceiling
was covered with clothes-lines, the walls were variegated with
theatrical placards and wood-cuts from newspapers or advertisements.
Evidently the eldest boy, the owner of the school-books stacked in a
corner, was left in charge while his parents were absent at the
theatre. In many a French workingman's family, so soon as a child
reaches the age of six or seven, it plays the part of mother to
younger sisters and brothers.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: Montaigne: "What do I know?" Or with Socrates: "I know that I
know nothing." Or: "Here I do not trust myself, no door is open
to me." Or: "Even if the door were open, why should I enter
immediately?" Or: "What is the use of any hasty hypotheses? It
might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all.
Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is crooked?
to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum? Is there not time
enough for that? Has not the time leisure? Oh, ye demons, can ye
not at all WAIT? The uncertain also has its charms, the Sphinx,
too, is a Circe, and Circe, too, was a philosopher."--Thus does a
skeptic console himself; and in truth he needs some consolation.
Beyond Good and Evil |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: admire the pretty gallery in the form of an arcade, where the
courtiers of Louis XII. awaited the reception-hour when it rained, and
where, at the present moment, were several seigneurs attached to the
Guises; for the staircase (so well preserved to the present day) which
led to their apartments is at the end of this gallery in a tower, the
architecture of which commends itself to the admiration of intelligent
beholders.
"Well, well! did you come here to study the carving of images?" cried
Pardaillan, as Christophe stopped before the charming sculptures of
the balustrade which unites, or, if you prefer it, separates the
columns of each arcade.
|
