| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: hereditary high chief of the Tevas, the note is solely
written: a small attention from a clansman to his chief.
Note 12, "LET THE PIGS BE TAPU." It is impossible to explain
TAPU in a note; we have it as an English word, taboo.
Suffice it, that a thing which was TAPU must not be touched,
nor a place that was TAPU visited.
Note 13, "FISH, THE FOOD OF DESIRE." There is a special word
in the Tahitian language to signify HUNGERING AFTER FISH. I
may remark that here is one of my chief difficulties about
the whole story. How did king, commons, women, and all come
to eat together at this feast? But it troubled none of my
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: advanced toward her now. "Sha'n't Tommy push--the baby-carriage
up to the house for you, Miss Eudora?" he said, in his cracked
old voice.
Eudora flushed slightly, and, as if in response, the old man
flushed, also. "No, I thank you, Wilson," she said, and moved on.
The boy, who was raking dry leaves, stood gazing at them with a
shrewd, whimsical expression. He was the old man's grandson.
"Is that a boy or a girl kid, grandpa?" he inquired, when the
gardener returned.
"Hold your tongue!" replied the old man, irascibly. Suddenly he
seized the boy by his two thin little shoulders with knotted old
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: him:--he wanted to know why you, who never before wrote a line of poetry,
now that you are in prison are turning Aesop's fables into verse, and also
composing that hymn in honour of Apollo.
Tell him, Cebes, he replied, what is the truth--that I had no idea of
rivalling him or his poems; to do so, as I knew, would be no easy task.
But I wanted to see whether I could purge away a scruple which I felt about
the meaning of certain dreams. In the course of my life I have often had
intimations in dreams 'that I should compose music.' The same dream came
to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying
the same or nearly the same words: 'Cultivate and make music,' said the
dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort
|
