| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: discerned in Francesca the imprudence of girlhood, the true nature of
a woman as yet unbroken, sometimes struggling against her love, and at
other moments yielding and carried away by it. The old man certainly
behaved to her as a father to his daughter, and Francesca treated him
with a deeply felt gratitude which roused her instinctive nobleness.
The situation and the woman were to Rodolphe an impenetrable enigma,
of which the solution attracted him more and more.
These last days were full of secret joys, alternating with melancholy
moods, with tiffs and quarrels even more delightful than the hours
when Rodolphe and Francesca were of one mind. And he was more and more
fascinated by this tenderness apart from wit, always and in all things
Albert Savarus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: is confusedly employed. As there is no longer a real court or nobility
to give the tone, there is no harmony in the production of art. Never,
on the other hand, has architecture discovered so many economical ways
of imitating the real and the solid, or displayed more resources, more
talent, in distributing them. Propose to an architect to build upon
the garden at the back of an old mansion, and he will run you up a
little Louvre overloaded with ornament. He will manage to get in a
courtyard, stables, and if you care for it, a garden. Inside the house
he will accommodate a quantity of little rooms and passages. He is so
clever in deceiving the eye that you think you will have plenty of
space; but it is only a nest of small rooms, after all, in which a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square
roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and
Madame de Stael; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of
land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey's Memoirs: she let it uphold
her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine
intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like
iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that
she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker
them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the
myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. It was still
being fabricated. William Bankes was praising the Waverly novels.
To the Lighthouse |
