| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: beyond them I could see through open windows into miserable
rooms where whole families were born and fed, and slept and
died. At one a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the
graveyard; and from another came the shrill tones of a
scolding woman. Every here and there was a town garden full
of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the
window-seat. But you do not grasp the full connection
between these houses of the dead and the living, the
unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid houses,
till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the
surface of the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: MRS. ALLONBY. He is very nice; very nice indeed. But I can't
stand the American young lady.
LORD ILLINGWORTH. Why?
MRS. ALLONBY. She told me yesterday, and in quite a loud voice
too, that she was only eighteen. It was most annoying.
LORD ILLINGWORTH. One should never trust a woman who tells one her
real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one
anything.
MRS. ALLONBY. She is a Puritan besides -
LORD ILLINGWORTH. Ah, that is inexcusable. I don't mind plain
women being Puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: would perpetrate such a folly, yet feel as if some other might.
To my own contemplations, at least, it has often recurred, always
exciting wonder, but with a sense that the story must be true,
and a conception of its hero's character. Whenever any subject so
forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it.
If the reader choose, let him do his own meditation; or if he
prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield's
vagary, I bid him welcome; trusting that there will be a
pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them,
done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence. Thought
has always its efficacy, and every striking incident its moral.
Twice Told Tales |
