| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: a mystery how he and the respectable-looking old man had come
here. How was it they were not ashamed to sit here? What were
they thinking about when they looked at the women?
If the violin and the piano had been played by men in rags,
looking hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces,
then one could have understood their presence, perhaps. As it
was, Vassilyev could not understand it at all. He recalled the
story of the fallen woman he had once read, and he thought now
that that human figure with the guilty smile had nothing in
common with what he was seeing now. It seemed to him that he was
seeing not fallen women, but some different world quite apart,
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: account of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being
compelled to hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a
public body in England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster
who, conceiving himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against
his orders by a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him
publicly as a satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority.
I had intended to give the particulars of this ease, but find the
drudgery of repeating such stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust
to a man who was doing only what others all over the country were
doing as part of the established routine of what is called education.
The astounding part of it was the manner in which the person to whom
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: he came to Russia, and came to see me. Moist eyes of almond
shape, smiling red lips, a little moustache well waxed, hair
brushed in the latest fashion, a vulgarly pretty face,--what the
women call 'not bad,'--feebly built physically, but with no
deformity; with hips as broad as a woman's; correct, and
insinuating himself into the familiarity of people as far as
possible, but having that keen sense that quickly detects a false
step and retires in reason,--a man, in short, observant of the
external rules of dignity, with that special Parisianism that is
revealed in buttoned boots, a gaudy cravat, and that something
which foreigners pick up in Paris, and which, in its peculiarity
The Kreutzer Sonata |
