| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: silence, "you must have known the truth pretty well."
"No, no, sir!" exclaimed George.
"Well," said the other, "you have syphilis."
George was utterly stunned. "My God!" he exclaimed.
The doctor, having finished his prescription, looked up and
observed his condition. "Don't trouble yourself, sir. Out of
every seven men you meet upon the street, in society, or at the
theater, there is at least one who has been in your condition.
One out of seven--fifteen per cent!"
George was staring before him. He spoke low, as if to himself.
"I know what I am going to do."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: profound sadness, prostration of flesh and general flabbiness. Now the
old maid, who was all eyes, and followed the great and notable changes
which were taking place in the person of this badly hanged man, pulled
the surgeon by the sleeve, and pointing out to him, by a curious
glance of the eye, the piteous cause, said to him--
"Will he for the future be always like that?"
"Often," replied the veracious surgeon.
"Oh! he was much nicer hanged!"
At this speech the king burst out laughing. Seeing him at the window,
the woman and the surgeon were much frightened, for this laugh seemed
to them a second sentence of death for their poor victim. But the king
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: 'fors' in the same sentence where the Greek repeats (Greek). There is a
similar want of particles expressing the various gradations of objective
and subjective thought--(Greek) and the like, which are so thickly
scattered over the Greek page. Further, we can only realize to a very
imperfect degree the common distinction between (Greek), and the
combination of the two suggests a subtle shade of negation which cannot be
expressed in English. And while English is more dependent than Greek upon
the apposition of clauses and sentences, yet there is a difficulty in using
this form of construction owing to the want of case endings. For the same
reason there cannot be an equal variety in the order of words or an equal
nicety of emphasis in English as in Greek.
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