| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Redheaded Outfield by Zane Grey: strange waiting silence. The umpire threw out a
glistening white ball, which Duveen rubbed in the
dust and spat upon. Then he wound himself up
into a knot, slowly unwound, and swinging with
effort, threw for the plate.
Burt's lithe shoulders swung powerfully. The
meeting of ball and bat fairly cracked. The low
driving hit lined over second a rising glittering
streak, and went far beyond the center fielder.
Bleachers and stands uttered one short cry,
almost a groan, and then stared at the speeding
The Redheaded Outfield |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original length.
The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb,
according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make
nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a
journalistic epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate
and copula combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a
real copula does not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to
the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it must be confessed
that the Tartars get on very well without any such couplings to
their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in their
sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: certain means of salvation from the terrible evil from which men
were suffering was that they should always acknowledge themselves
to be sinning against God, and therefore unable to punish or
correct others, because they were dear to Him. It became clear to
him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons
and jails and the quiet self-satisfaction of the perpetrators of
this evil were the consequences of men trying to do what was
impossible; trying to correct evil while being evil themselves;
vicious men were trying to correct other vicious men, and thought
they could do it by using mechanical means, and the only
consequence of all this was that the needs and the cupidity of
Resurrection |
