| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a
pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to
make money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight
its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its
instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the
resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and
suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to
the mischief you may do. Swear at a child, throw your boots at it,
send it flying from the room with a cuff or a kick; and the experience
will be as instructive to the child as a difficulty with a
short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place tells us that his father
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: not explain why, in man and in man only, the speaker met with a response
from the hearer, and the half articulate sound gradually developed into
Sanscrit and Greek. They hardly enable us to approach any nearer the
secret of the origin of language, which, like some of the other great
secrets of nature,--the origin of birth and death, or of animal life,--
remains inviolable. That problem is indissolubly bound up with the origin
of man; and if we ever know more of the one, we may expect to know more of
the other. (Compare W. Humboldt, 'Ueber die Verschiedenheit des
menschlichen Sprachbaues;' M. Muller, 'Lectures on the Science of
Language;' Steinthal, 'Einleitung in die Psychologie und
Sprachwissenschaft.'
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: the work.
Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a
meadow, then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place
the peasants would not let them pass, in another it was the
priest's land and they could not cross it, in another Ivan Ionov
had bought a plot from the landowner and had dug a ditch round
it. They kept having to turn back.
They reached Nizhneye Gorodistche. Near the tavern on the
dung-strewn earth, where the snow was still lying, there stood
wagons that had brought great bottles of crude sulphuric acid.
There were a great many people in the tavern, all drivers, and
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
