| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: her to come at such an hour on Tuesday; and be it midnight or six
o'clock in the morning, ten o'clock, five o'clock, breakfast time,
dinner time, bed time, any particularly inconvenient hour in the day--
she will come, punctual to the minute, beautiful, beautifully dressed,
and enchanting. And she is a married woman, with all the complications
and duties of a household. The fibs that she must invent, the reasons
she must find for conforming to my whims would tax the ingenuity of
some of us! . . . Claudine never wearies; you can always count upon
her. It is not love, I tell her, it is infatuation. She writes to me
every day; I do not read her letters; she found that out, but still
she writes. See here; there are two hundred letters in this casket.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: there, planning for the future bliss of their nearest and
dearest;--mothers and fathers of handsome lads, lithe and elegant
as young pines, and fresh from the polish of foreign university
training;--mothers and fathers of splendid girls whose simplest
attitudes were witcheries. Young cheeks flushed, young hearts
fluttered with an emotion more puissant than the excitement of
the dance;--young eyes betrayed the happy secret discreeter lips
would have preserved. Slave-servants circled through the
aristocratic press, bearing dainties and wines, praying
permission to pass in terms at once humble and officious,--always
in the excellent French which well-trained house-servants were
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: cottagers and labourers, with their wives and children, who are
beggars in effect; I desire those politicians who dislike my
overture, and may perhaps be so bold to attempt an answer, that
they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they
would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been
sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and
thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as
they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, the
impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of
common sustenance, with neither house nor cloaths to cover them
from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable
A Modest Proposal |
