| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: your clients, and I myself have my friends at my cafe.'
" 'His friends!' thought I to myself.--'Very well,' said I, 'why not
come at dinner-time?'
" 'That is the time,' said Gobseck, 'after 'Change, at five o'clock.
Good, you will see me Wednesdays and Saturdays. We will talk over
business like a pair of friends. Aha! I am gay sometimes. Just give me
the wing of a partridge and a glass of champagne, and we will have our
chat together. I know a great many things that can be told now at this
distance of time; I will teach you to know men, and what is more--
women!'
" 'Oh! a partridge and a glass of champagne if you like.'
Gobseck |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a
speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver,
partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together
fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I
believe, she composed.
MENEXENUS: And can you remember what Aspasia said?
SOCRATES: I ought to be able, for she taught me, and she was ready to
strike me because I was always forgetting.
MENEXENUS: Then why will you not rehearse what she said?
SOCRATES: Because I am afraid that my mistress may be angry with me if I
publish her speech.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: life might be romantic enough, in his blighted con-
dition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment
and too much distracting variety about it. So he
thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit
pon that of professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He
asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and
his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit
bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had
no misgivings to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom,
she watched the bottle clandestinely. She found that
the medicine did really diminish, but it did not occur
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
