| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: head without any concealment whatever.
This master of the fine art was a personage and nothing more; but,
as I have said, there was an infinite diversity of temperament
amongst the masters of the fine art I have known. Some were great
impressionists. They impressed upon you the fear of God and
Immensity - or, in other words, the fear of being drowned with
every circumstance of terrific grandeur. One may think that the
locality of your passing away by means of suffocation in water does
not really matter very much. I am not so sure of that. I am,
perhaps, unduly sensitive, but I confess that the idea of being
suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of darkness
The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: while a winter wind searches your bones. I used to
think that Santa Claus dwelt at the North Pole.
Now I am convinced that he has a workshop somewhere
among the great mountains where dwell the
Seasons, and that his reindeer paw for grazing in the
alpine meadows below the highest peaks.
Here the birds migrate up and down instead of
south and north. It must be a great saving of trouble
to them, and undoubtedly those who have discovered
it maintain toward the unenlightened the same
delighted and fraternal secrecy with which you and I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die
Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more
Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not
to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the
trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical
discourses of Wotan in the three true music dramas of The Ring.
There is, however, no real atavism involved. Die Gotterdammerung,
though the last of The Ring dramas in order of performance, was
the first in order of conception and was indeed the root from
which all the others sprang.
The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior
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