| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: and one white camellia--emblem of a man's blood at the service of
the purity he worships--that will be my answer. I ask no more;
thenceforth, at any moment, ten years hence or to-morrow, whatever
you demand shall be done, so far as it is possible for man to do
it, by your happy servant,
"FELIPE HENAREZ."
/P. S./--You must admit, dear, that great lords know how to love! See
the spring of the African lion! What restrained fire! What loyalty!
What sincerity! How high a soul in low estate! I felt quite small and
dazed as I said to myself, "What shall I do?"
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: exposing myself, but by the fear that, as the bell-cord hung by
the chimney, I might, in making my way to it, be again crossed by
the fiendish hag, who, I figured to myself, might be still
lurking about some corner of the apartment.
"I will not pretend to describe what hot and cold fever-fits
tormented me for the rest of the night, through broken sleep,
weary vigils, and that dubious state which forms the neutral
ground between them. A hundred terrible objects appeared to
haunt me; but there was the great difference betwixt the vision
which I have described, and those which followed, that I knew the
last to be deceptions of my own fancy and over-excited nerves.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: [6] "Traveling incognito" is at least the meaning of the original
phrase,-- "making a disguised august-journey" (shinobi no go-ryoko).
[7] The Smaller Pragna-Paramita-Hridaya-Sutra is thus called in Japanese.
Both the smaller and larger sutras called Pragna-Paramita ("Transcendent
Wisdom") have been translated by the late Professor Max Muller, and can be
found in volume xlix. of the Sacred Books of the East ("Buddhist Mahayana
Sutras"). -- Apropos of the magical use of the text, as described in this
story, it is worth remarking that the subject of the sutra is the Doctrine
of the Emptiness of Forms,-- that is to say, of the unreal character of all
phenomena or noumena... "Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form.
Emptiness is not different from form; form is not different from emptiness.
Kwaidan |
