| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries--
and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they
were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of.
He could not direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might.
Was it before this or after that I wandered about for an hour
in the small canals, to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier,
who had never seen me so restless and yet so void of a purpose and
could extract from me no order but "Go anywhere--everywhere--all over
the place"? He reminded me that I had not lunched and expressed
therefore respectfully the hope that I would dine earlier.
He had had long periods of leisure during the day, when I had left
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: "St. Paul." Perhaps if we were to confess our lingering fondness
for the cadence prepared by the 6/4 chord, when not too
frequently introduced, it might only show that we retain a liking
for New England "psalm-tunes"; but it does seem to us that a
sense of final repose, of entire cessation of movement, is more
effectually secured by this cadence than by any other. Yet while
the 6/4 cadence most completely expresses finality and rest, it
would seem that the plagal and other cadences above enumerated as
preferred by Mr. Paine have a certain sort of superiority by
reason of the very incompleteness with which they express
finality. There is no sense of finality whatever about the
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: attire.) "Button up your greatcoat, muffle yourself up to the eyes in
your traveling cloak, take my arm, and let us go as quickly as
possible to Camusot's house before anybody can meet us."
"Then am I going to see a man called Camusot?" she asked.
"With a nose to match his name,"[*] assented Chesnel.
[*] Camus, flat-nosed
The old notary felt his heart dead within him, but he thought it none
the less necessary to humor the Duchess, to laugh when she laughed,
and shed tears when she wept; groaning in spirit, all the same, over
the feminine frivolity which could find matter for a jest while
setting about a matter so serious. What would he not have done to save
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