| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: fine tragedy; but though these pieces had given him a notion that
the social usages of Venice differed from those at home, he was
unprepared for the surprising appearance and manners of the great
people his friend named to him. The gravest Senators of the
Republic went in prodigious striped trousers, short cloaks and
feathered hats. One nobleman wore a ruff and doctor's gown,
another a black velvet tunic slashed with rose-colour; while the
President of the dreaded Council of Ten was a terrible strutting
fellow with a rapier-like nose, a buff leather jerkin and a
trailing scarlet cloak that the crowd was careful not to step on.
It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: man, that of speech has been conveyed to him through the medium, not of the
many, but of the few, who were his 'law-givers'--'the legislator with the
dialectician standing on his right hand,' in Plato's striking image, who
formed the manners of men and gave them customs, whose voice and look and
behaviour, whose gesticulations and other peculiarities were instinctively
imitated by them,--the 'king of men' who was their priest, almost their
God...But these are conjectures only: so little do we know of the origin
of language that the real scholar is indisposed to touch the subject at
all.
(2) There are other errors besides the figment of a primitive or original
language which it is time to leave behind us. We no longer divide
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: with the sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the
rattling of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the
child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble moaning and
a subdued bass muttering.
The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could
don, at will, an expression of great virtue. She possessed a small
music-box capable of one tune, and a collection of "God bless yehs"
pitched in assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took a position
upon the stones of Fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under
her and crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol. She received
daily a small sum in pennies. It was contributed, for the most
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
