| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: 'a' had it all yourself, Marcus Schouler," he muttered to
himself on the stairs. "You mushhead, you damn fool!"
Meanwhile, Marcus was becoming involved in the politics of
his ward. As secretary of the Polk Street Improvement Club
--which soon developed into quite an affair and began to
assume the proportions of a Republican political machine--he
found he could make a little, a very little more than enough
to live on. At once he had given up his position as Old
Grannis's assistant in the dog hospital. Marcus felt
that he needed a wider sphere. He had his eye upon a place
connected with the city pound. When the great railroad
McTeague |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: to the natural history of the "Worm." Kirby, speaking of it,
says, "the larvae of Crambus pinguinalis spins a robe which it
covers with its own excrement, and does no little injury."
Again, "I have often observed the caterpillar of a little moth
that takes its station in damp old books, and there commits
great ravages, and many a black-letter rarity, which in these days
of bibliomania would have been valued at its weight in gold,
has been snatched by these devastators," etc., etc.
As already quoted, Doraston's description is very vague.
To him he is in one verse "a sort of busy worm," and in another "a
puny rankling reptile." Hannett, in his work on book-binding,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: of the soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of
vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is
always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative
body. What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one
brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred
legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are
belittled and lost in a crowd. Rigou's law contains the essential
element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to
put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to
halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of
Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.
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