| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: without a moment's delay, getting out his letter-pad,
and writing hurriedly--
"Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me
if before nightfall I can know that there is a piano
under my roof. Even if it remains dumb, it will be some
comfort to have it here and look at it, and imagine
how a great master might make it speak.
"Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's,
say at eleven this forenoon, and give me the inestimable
benefit of your judgment in selecting an instrument?
"Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now,
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form
and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was
only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out to
enjoy their companionship. He had taken up some bricks in his floor
underneath his loom, and here he had made a hole in which he set the
iron pot that contained his guineas and silver coins, covering the
bricks with sand whenever he replaced them. Not that the idea of
being robbed presented itself often or strongly to his mind:
hoarding was common in country districts in those days; there were
old labourers in the parish of Raveloe who were known to have their
savings by them, probably inside their flock-beds; but their rustic
Silas Marner |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: thousand-year-old feminine civilization, the word WOMAN called
up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social
development; and the word MAN meant to them only MALE--the sex.
Of course we could TELL them that in our world men did
everything; but that did not alter the background of their minds.
That man, "the male," did all these things was to them a statement,
making no more change in the point of view than was made in ours
when we first faced the astounding fact--to us--that in Herland
women were "the world."
We had been living there more than a year. We had learned
their limited history, with its straight, smooth, upreaching lines,
Herland |
