| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: been able to resist you . . . and I shall be punished
for it, you will cease to love me! At least, I want
to preserve my reputation . . . not for myself --
that you know very well! . . . Oh! I beseech
you: do not torture me, as before, with idle
doubts and feigned coldness! It may be that I
shall die soon; I feel that I am growing weaker
from day to day. . . And, yet, I cannot think
of the future life, I think only of you. . . You
men do not understand the delights of a glance,
of a pressure of the hand . . . but as for me, I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: There is a movement for making our British children into priggish
little barefooted vagabonds, all talking like that born fool George
Borrow, and supposed to be splendidly healthy because they would die
if they slept in rooms with the windows shut, or perhaps even with a
roof over their heads. Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; and it
may do something to establish Mr Harold Cox's claim of a Right to Roam
as the basis of a much needed law compelling proprietors of land to
provide plenty of gates in their fences, and to leave them unlocked
when there are no growing crops to be damaged nor bulls to be
encountered, instead of, as at present, imprisoning the human race in
dusty or muddy thoroughfares between walls of barbed wire.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: of black hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and
dazzlingly white teeth.
I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of
them, Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a
statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front
seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable
airing. She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in
the south. In her haughty weariness she used to make me think of
Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the master for
which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and
unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
Some Reminiscences |
