| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: and I won't have none of your barley,
But I'll take a measure of fine white
flour, to make a cake for Charley.'
WE WERE SINGING rhymes to tease Antonia while she was beating up
one of Charley's favourite cakes in her big mixing-bowl.
It was a crisp autumn evening, just cold enough to make one glad
to quit playing tag in the yard, and retreat into the kitchen.
We had begun to roll popcorn balls with syrup when we heard a knock
at the back door, and Tony dropped her spoon and went to open it.
A plump, fair-skinned girl was standing in the doorway.
She looked demure and pretty, and made a graceful picture
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: think without a shudder of the flood of phrases which, day by day,
renewed each dawn, leaps in cascades the length and breadth of sunny
France?
You know the species; let us now take a look at the individual.
There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the paragon
of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the
qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is
vitriol and likewise glue,--glue to catch and entangle his victim and
make him sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve hard heads,
close fists, and closer calculations. His line was once the HAT; but
his talents and the art with which he snared the wariest provincial
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling
class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the
class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at
an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the
proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie
today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of
The Communist Manifesto |
