| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: But if I were you, my fancy would look on a little farther
For the glimpse of a release that may be somewhere still in sight.
Furthermore, you must remember those two hundred invitations
For the dancing after dinner. We shall have to shine tonight.
We shall dance, and be as happy as a pair of merry spectres,
On the grave of all the lies that we shall never have to tell;
We shall dance among the ruins of the tomb of our endurance,
And I have not a doubt that we shall do it very well.
There! -- I'm glad you've put it back; for I don't like it.
Shut the drawer now.
No -- no -- don't cancel anything. I'll dance until I drop.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very
high moral tone on all subjects. It's one's duty to do so. And as
a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either
one's health or one's happiness, in order to get up to town I have
always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest,
who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes.
That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple.
ALGERNON. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life
would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a
complete impossibility!
JACK. That wouldn't be at all a bad thing.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: hadn't ever seen a bigger one. He would a been
worth a good deal over at the village. They peddle
out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-
house there; everybody buys some of him; his meat's
as white as snow and makes a good fry.
Next morning I said it was getting slow and dull,
and I wanted to get a stirring up some way. I said I
reckoned I would slip over the river and find out what
was going on. Jim liked that notion; but he said I
must go in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied
it over and said, couldn't I put on some of them old
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
