| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: friend who chances to drop in, and so pass away the morning, doing
pretty nearly the same in the evening, with the addition of punch now
and then. After these great people and aristocracy of Kolomna, come
the rank and file. It is as difficult to put a name to them as to
remember the multitude of insects which breed in stale vinegar. There
are old women who get drunk, who make a living by incomprehensible
means, like ants, dragging old clothes and rags from the Kalinkin
Bridge to the old clothes-mart, in order to sell them for fifteen
kopeks--in short, the very dregs of mankind, whose conditions no
beneficent, political economist has devised any means of ameliorating.
"I have mentioned them in order to point out how often such people
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: The damp air will certainly penetrate, and as the absence
of ventilation will assist the formation of mould, the books
will be worse off than if they had been placed in open shelves.
If security be desirable, by all means abolish the glass
and place ornamental brass wire-work in its stead.
Like the writers of old Cookery Books who stamped special
receipts with the testimony of personal experience, I can
say "probatum est."
CHAPTER III.
GAS AND HEAT.
WHAT a valuable servant is Gas, and how dreadfully we
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: Anglo-Saxons, and we only, say, in our foredoomed clutch of exotic
aids to expression) in that galere? To answer these questions
plausibly, to answer them as under cross-examination in the
witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in other words
satisfactorily to account for Strether and for his "peculiar
tone," was to possess myself of the entire fabric. At the same
time the clue to its whereabouts would lie in a certain principle
of probability: he wouldn't have indulged in his peculiar tone
without a reason; it would take a felt predicament or a false
position to give him so ironic an accent. One hadn't been noting
"tones" all one's life without recognising when one heard it the
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