| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling: another. 'You see, I can't let you into the Hills because the
People of the Hills have gone; but if you care to take seisin
from me, I may be able to show you something out of the
common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.'
'What's taking seisin?' said Dan, cautiously.
'It's an old custom the people had when they bought
and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it
over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seised of
your land - it didn't really belong to you - till the other
fellow had actually given you a piece of it -'like this.' He
held out the turves.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: an' deh t'ings I tol' her to remember? When a girl is bringed up
deh way I bringed up Maggie, how kin she go teh deh devil?"
Jimmie was transfixed by these questions. He could not
conceive how under the circumstances his mother's daughter and his
sister could have been so wicked.
His mother took a drink from a squdgy bottle that sat on the
table. She continued her lament.
"She had a bad heart, dat girl did, Jimmie. She was wicked
teh deh heart an' we never knowed it."
Jimmie nodded, admitting the fact.
"We lived in deh same house wid her an' I brought her up an'
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern
theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially
vaudevillist spirit of the pit.
So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded,
hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in
all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in
appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which
women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least
reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the
extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming
with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully
|
