| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: to quarrel like a washerwoman! And do you not perceive that
in the person of this priest is represented the whole people
of Paris and that it is dangerous to insult him at this
moment, and if this priest wished it, in an hour you would
be without a crown? Come, then, on another occasion you can
be firm and strong; but to-day is not the proper time;
to-day, flatter and caress, or you are only a common woman."
(At the first words of this address D'Artagnan had seized
Porthos's arm, which he pressed with gradually increasing
force. When Mazarin ceased speaking he said to Porthos in a
low tone:
Twenty Years After |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: peated, seeking for the word--"trash." They
were trash, he reiterated, and moreover I was young
yet . . .
This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer
exposed to that sort of insult) made me huffy too.
I felt ready in my own mind to back up every asser-
tion of Schomberg's and on any subject. In a mo-
ment, devil only knows why, Hermann and I were
looking at each other most inimically. He caught
up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the
pleasure of calling after him:
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: right hand open towards a map of Dunkirk, which was pinned against the
hangings,--I think, quoth Corporal Trim, with humble submission to your
Honour's better judgment,--that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and
hornworks, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it
here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were
we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of
ground to do what we pleased with: As summer is coming on, continued Trim,
your Honour might sit out of doors, and give me the nography--(Call it
ichnography, quoth my uncle,)--of the town or citadel, your Honour was
pleased to sit down before,--and I will be shot by your Honour upon the
glacis of it, if I did not fortify it to your Honour's mind.--I dare say
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