| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: of one passes into the other. It makes three Voices, Active, Passive, and
Middle, but takes no notice of the precarious existence and uncertain
character of the last of the three. Language is a thing of degrees and
relations and associations and exceptions: grammar ties it up in fixed
rules. Language has many varieties of usage: grammar tries to reduce them
to a single one. Grammar divides verbs into regular and irregular: it
does not recognize that the irregular, equally with the regular, are
subject to law, and that a language which had no exceptions would not be a
natural growth: for it could not have been subjected to the influences by
which language is ordinarily affected. It is always wanting to describe
ancient languages in the terms of a modern one. It has a favourite fiction
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
* * * *
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
* * * *
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Prufrock/Other Observations |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: without uttering a word, scarce making a movement, hardly daring to
breathe. She had told him before that this mysterious hero of romance
was the talk of the smart set to which she belonged; already, before
this, her heart and her imagination had stirred by the thought of the
brave man, who, unknown to fame, had rescued hundreds of lives from a
terrible, often an unmerciful fate. She had but little real sympathy
with those haughty French aristocrats, insolent in their pride of
caste, of whom the Comtesse de Tournay de Basserive was so typical an
example; but republican and liberal-minded though she was from
principle, she hated and loathed the methods which the young Republic
had chosen for establishing itself. She had not been in Paris for
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
