| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears.
The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They
are worthy of respect too. And he is not insensible who pays
them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob,
and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not
detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by
love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible
to become a sham.
Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too
much the creature of my time for that. But I think that the
proper wisdom is to will what the gods will without perhaps being
Some Reminiscences |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: An inscription engraved on a broken column in the cemetery at
Montmartre states that Madame de Sommervieux died at the age of
twenty-seven. In the simple words of this epitaph one of the timid
creature's friends can read the last scene of a tragedy. Every year,
on the second of November, the solemn day of the dead, he never passes
this youthful monument without wondering whether it does not need a
stronger woman than Augustine to endure the violent embrace of genius?
"The humble and modest flowers that bloom in the valley," he reflects,
"perish perhaps when they are transplanted too near the skies, to the
region where storms gather and the sun is scorching."
ADDENDUM
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in
the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a
conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their
costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.
Newland Archer, as became a young man of his
position, strolled in somewhat late. He had left his
overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings
were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had dawdled
a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and
furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men
were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and
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