| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: herself, fresh as if from a bath, and singing at her work;
the morning sun, striking obliquely through the white muslin
half-curtain of the window and spanning the little kitchen
with a bridge of golden mist--gave off, as it were, a note
of gayety that was not to be resisted. Through the opened
top of the window came the noises of Polk Street, already
long awake. One heard the chanting of street cries, the
shrill calling of children on their way to school, the merry
rattle of a butcher's cart, the brisk noise of hammering, or
the occasional prolonged roll of a cable car trundling
heavily past, with a vibrant whirring of its jostled glass
McTeague |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and
life.
I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control
attributed by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist.
Prima donnas and tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as
anywhere else. Casts are capriciously changed; stage business is
insufficiently rehearsed; the public are compelled to listen to a
Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when they have carefully arranged
to see one of twenty-five, much as in any ordinary opera house.
Even the conductors upset the arrangements occasionally. On the
other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars out of account,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: thirst," and again I turned towards the door.
At this he cried out--
"I will tell you. It was the white medicine-man who lives here;
he who cut me open. He arranged it all a few days ago because he
hates you. Last night he rode to tell the impi when to come."
"When is it to come?" I asked, holding the jug of water towards
him.
"To-night at the rising of the moon, so that it may get far away
before the dawn. My people are thirsty for your blood and for
that of the other white chief, because you killed so many of them
by the river. The others they will not harm."
|
