| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as
if I had laboriously learned the English language from books.
The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed
to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of
a wholly incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter, one in particular
was very potently - even terrifiedly - recalled by the youngest
of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period
such a phrase began to have an actual currency - first in England
and then in the United States - and though of much complexity
and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular
Shadow out of Time |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: May have its roots, and in the rest its leaves,
Now unto thee can manifest be made.
O Covetousness, that mortals dost ingulf
Beneath thee so, that no one hath the power
Of drawing back his eyes from out thy waves!
Full fairly blossoms in mankind the will;
But the uninterrupted rain converts
Into abortive wildings the true plums.
Fidelity and innocence are found
Only in children; afterwards they both
Take flight or e'er the cheeks with down are covered.
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: I believe he was much disappointed that I did not feel his
offensive sayings more acutely, for when he had said anything
particularly well calculated to hurt my feelings, he would stare me
searchingly in the face, and then grumble against my 'marble heart'
or my 'brutal insensibility.' If I had bitterly wept and deplored
his lost affection, he would, perhaps, have condescended to pity
me, and taken me into favour for a while, just to comfort his
solitude and console him for the absence of his beloved Annabella,
until he could meet her again, or some more fitting substitute.
Thank heaven, I am not so weak as that! I was infatuated once with
a foolish, besotted affection, that clung to him in spite of his
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
