| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: greatest geniuses of the French school of painting; a fact the family
did not believe. The eldest son, Don Juan de Lora assured his cousin
Gazonal that he was certainly the dupe of some Parisian wag.
Now the said Gazonal was intending to go to Paris to prosecute a
lawsuit which the prefect of the Eastern Pyrenees had arbitrarily
removed from the usual jurisdiction, transferring it to that of the
Council of State. The worthy provincial determined to investigate this
act, and to ask his Parisian cousin the reason of such high-handed
measures. It thus happened that Monsieur Gazonal came to Paris, took
shabby lodgings in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and was amazed to
see the palace of his cousin in the rue de Berlin. Being told that the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: and copula combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a
real copula does not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to
the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it must be confessed
that the Tartars get on very well without any such couplings to
their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in their
sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only
to be pushed, not pulled along.
The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character
of the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a
quality is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in
apposition with the noun.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: ever, but that face, which, like some ideal conception of art, was
incapable of anything like untruth and grimace, expressed by some
mysterious means such a depth of infinite patience that I felt
profoundly ashamed of myself.
"This thing is beyond words altogether," I said. "Beyond
forgiveness, beyond forgetting, beyond anger or jealousy. . . .
There is nothing between us two that could make us act together."
"Then we must fall back perhaps on something within us, that - you
admit it? - we have in common."
"Don't be childish," I said. "You give one with a perpetual and
intense freshness feelings and sensations that are as old as the
The Arrow of Gold |
