| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: home, as he was saying good-by to my father, he held his hand in
his and began once more:
"Still, I must tell you, Lyoff Nikolaievich, that I and my
wife have been thinking it over, and we have come to the
conclusion," and so on, word for word the same.
"No, no, I want to die--to die as soon as possible," groaned
my father when he had seen the friend off.
"Isn't it all the same whether it's 'Circle of Reading' or
'For Every Day'? No, it's time for me to die: I cannot live like
this any longer."
And, after all, in the end, one of the editions of the sayings
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: you see it. You fall into error occasionally, because you
mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing,
and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning
out of it. German names almost always do mean something,
and this helps to deceive the student. I translated
a passage one day, which said that "the infuriated tigress
broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest"
(Tannenwald). When I was girding up my loins to doubt this,
I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a
man's name.
Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: three for a moment wrapped in darkness. When the pale light
returned, the two phantoms were as if in the grasp of the Shadow
that towered between them; and there was a blood stain on the
breast of the female; and the phantom male was leaning on its
phantom sword, and blood seemed trickling fast from the ruffles
from the lace; and the darkness of the intermediate Shadow
swallowed them up,--they were gone. And again the bubbles of light
shot, and sailed, and undulated, growing thicker and thicker and
more wildly confused in their movements.
The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from
the aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she
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