| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: that if reason and poesy persist in wrangling with the tools, the
brushes, we shall be brought to doubt, like Frenhofer, who is as much
excited in brain as he is exalted in art. A sublime painter, indeed;
but he had the misfortune to be born rich, and that enables him to
stray into theory and conjecture. Do not imitate him. Work! work!
painters should theorize with their brushes in their hands."
"We will contrive to get in," cried Poussin, not listening to Porbus,
and thinking only of the hidden masterpiece.
Porbus smiled at the youth's enthusiasm, and bade him farewell with a
kindly invitation to come and visit him.
*****
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: had been blocked for ten years. Through these irregular breaches you
will see that the side towards the courtyard is in perfect harmony
with the side towards the garden. The same ruin prevails. Tufts of
weeds outline the paving-stones; the walls are scored by enormous
cracks, and the blackened coping is laced with a thousand festoons of
pellitory. The stone steps are disjointed; the bell-cord is rotten;
the gutter-spouts broken. What fire from heaven could have fallen
there? By what decree has salt been sown on this dwelling? Has God
been mocked here? Or was France betrayed? These are the questions we
ask ourselves. Reptiles crawl over it, but give no reply. This empty
and deserted house is a vast enigma of which the answer is known to
La Grande Breteche |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: out but worked them off in a nook on the counter; and there were
other people as well--a changing pushing cluster, with every one to
mind at once and endless right change to make and information to
produce. But she kept hold of him throughout; she continued, for
herself, in a relation with him as close as that in which, behind
the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton luckily continued with the
sounder. This morning everything changed, but rather to
dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about fatal
desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with absolute
levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand--
at Park Chambers--and belonged supremely to the class that wired
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