| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: ship's lengths of the hunters.
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land
animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their
veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least
instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one
of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure
of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point
as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole
arterial system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary
pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his life may
be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the
Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: correlation of ideas simpler and more natural. The Greek appears to have
had an ear or intelligence for a long and complicated sentence which is
rarely to be found in modern nations; and in order to bring the Greek down
to the level of the modern, we must break up the long sentence into two or
more short ones. Neither is the same precision required in Greek as in
Latin or English, nor in earlier Greek as in later; there was nothing
shocking to the contemporary of Thucydides and Plato in anacolutha and
repetitions. In such cases the genius of the English language requires
that the translation should be more intelligible than the Greek. The want
of more distinctions between the demonstrative pronouns is also greatly
felt. Two genitives dependent on one another, unless familiarised by
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: the spell. Sometimes the brass bowl would get upset or the
cigarette box would fly up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the
floor. We would pick them up, re-establish everything, and fall
into a long silence, so close that the sound of the first word
would come with all the pain of a separation.
It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my
quarters in her house in the street of the Consuls. There were
certain advantages in that move. In my present abode my sudden
absences might have been in the long run subject to comment. On
the other hand, the house in the street of Consuls was a known out-
post of Legitimacy. But then it was covered by the occult
The Arrow of Gold |
