| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: Zaprudy. Both were silent for a minute, staring into each other's
face. The shopkeeper's amazement was so great that his fat face
spread in all directions like spilt dough.
"How dared you?" repeated the priest.
"Wha . . . what?" asked Andrey Andreyitch in bewilderment.
"You don't understand?" whispered Father Grigory, stepping back
in astonishment and clasping his hands. "What have you got on
your shoulders, a head or some other object? You send a note up
to the altar, and write a word in it which it would be unseemly
even to utter in the street! Why are you rolling your eyes?
Surely you know the meaning of the word?"
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: legend, Poverty of Peasants under Louis XIV. In the foreground
a man is fighting some dogs for some bones, which for that matter
are already quite fleshless. Beside him a wretched fellow is
twisting himself and compressing his stomach. Farther back a
woman lying on the ground is eating grass. At the back of the
landscape figures of which one cannot say whether they are
corpses or persons starving are also stretched on the soil. As
an example of the administration of the ancien regime the
same author assures us that ``a place in the police cost 300
livres and brought in 400,000.'' Such figures surely indicate a
great disinterestedness on the part of those who sold such
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: to a bill of exchange, legally not worth the paper it was written
upon, but practically very good business; for these women, poor
things, are afraid of the scandal that a protested bill makes in a
family, and would give themselves away in payment sooner than fail? I
wanted to find out what that bill of exchange really represented. Was
it stupidity, imprudence, love or charity?
" 'The second bill, bearing the signature "Fanny Malvaut," came to me
from a linen-draper on the highway to bankruptcy. Now, no creature who
has any credit with a bank comes to ME. The first step to my door
means that a man is desperately hard up; that the news of his failure
will soon come out: and, most of all, it means that he has been
Gobseck |
