| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: they were the cause of what was to follow. What I tell you is a
true and simple story, and I leave to it all the naivete of its
details and all the simplicity of its developments.
I realized then that as nothing in the world would make me forget
my mistress, it was needful for me to find some way of meeting
the expenses into which she drew me. Then, too, my love for her
had so disturbing an influence upon me that every moment I spent
away from Marguerite was like a year, and that I felt the need of
consuming these moments in the fire of some sort of passion, and
of living them so swiftly as not to know that I was living them.
I began by borrowing five or six thousand francs on my little
Camille |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: (2) The formation of the sentence and of the paragraph greatly differs in
Greek and English. The lines by which they are divided are generally much
more marked in modern languages than in ancient. Both sentences and
paragraphs are more precise and definite--they do not run into one another.
They are also more regularly developed from within. The sentence marks
another step in an argument or a narrative or a statement; in reading a
paragraph we silently turn over the page and arrive at some new view or
aspect of the subject. Whereas in Plato we are not always certain where a
sentence begins and ends; and paragraphs are few and far between. The
language is distributed in a different way, and less articulated than in
English. For it was long before the true use of the period was attained by
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: and begged their pardon. And now at last the young wrens were
satisfied, and sat down together and ate and drank, and made merry
till quite late into the night.
THE FROG-PRINCE
One fine evening a young princess put on her bonnet and clogs, and
went out to take a walk by herself in a wood; and when she came to a
cool spring of water, that rose in the midst of it, she sat herself
down to rest a while. Now she had a golden ball in her hand, which was
her favourite plaything; and she was always tossing it up into the
air, and catching it again as it fell. After a time she threw it up so
high that she missed catching it as it fell; and the ball bounded
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
