| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: if the quotation be read over again with this interpretation
(which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that the 'birth'
spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively self-
conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured,
unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the
parable unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly.
THAT birth certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace
and intuition and instinctive perfection of the animals
was lost. But the forgetfulness was not entire; the
memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an Eden-
garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: die an old maid. Love is undoubtedly an incarnation, and how many
conditions are needful before it can take place! We are not certain of
never quarreling with ourselves, how much less so when there are two?
This is a problem which God alone can solve.
I begin to think that I shall return to the convent. If I remain in
society, I shall do things which will look like follies, for I cannot
possibly reconcile myself to what I see. I am perpetually wounded
either in my sense of delicacy, my inner principles, or my secret
thoughts.
Ah! my mother is the happiest of women, adored as she is by Canalis,
her great little man. My love, do you know I am seized sometimes with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: rocks. A lane of mud and stones ended at the door. The sea-winds
coming ashore on Stonecutter's point, fresh from the fierce turmoil of
the waves, howled violently at the unmoved heaps of black boulders
holding up steadily short-armed, high crosses against the tremendous
rush of the invisible. In the sweep of gales the sheltered dwelling
stood in a calm resonant and disquieting, like the calm in the centre
of a hurricane. On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the bay of
Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled an immense black pit,
from which ascended mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there
had been alive and complaining. At high tide the returning water
assaulted the ledges of rock in short rushes, ending in bursts of
Tales of Unrest |
