| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: A lamp in darkness.
IV
A November Night
There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the street --
Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,
A necklace for my throat? I'd twist it round
And you could play with it. You smile at me
As though I were a little dreamy child
Behind whose eyes the fairies live. . . . And see,
The people on the street look up at us
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often
is in Germany. Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the
public of this. The voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod's Faust
and Bizet's Carmen has captured the common playgoer; and there
is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the
drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera
without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable
theatres have been driving at for a long time without knowing it)
is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem
as the normal materiel of the drama.
That this determination will throw me into a long conflict with
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: quality of its tint something delicate, refined and infernal. His soft
footfalls and the subdued beat of the clock on the high mantel-piece
answered each other regularly--as if time and himself, engaged in a
measured contest, had been pacing together through the infernal
delicacy of twilight towards a mysterious goal.
He walked from one end of the room to the other without a pause, like
a traveller who, at night, hastens doggedly upon an interminable
journey. Now and then he glanced at her. Impossible to know. The gross
precision of that thought expressed to his practical mind something
illimitable and infinitely profound, the all-embracing subtlety of a
feeling, the eternal origin of his pain. This woman had accepted him,
Tales of Unrest |
