| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: II
A small selection of hokku (1) on butterflies will help to illustrate
Japanese interest in the aesthetic side of the subject. Some are pictures
only,-- tiny color-sketches made with seventeen syllables; some are nothing
more than pretty fancies, or graceful suggestions;-- but the reader will
find variety. Probably he will not care much for the verses in themselves.
The taste for Japanese poetry of the epigrammatic sort is a taste that must
be slowly acquired; and it is only by degrees, after patient study, that
the possibilities of such composition can be fairly estimated. Hasty
criticism has declared that to put forward any serious claim on behalf of
seventeen-syllable poems "would be absurd." But what, then, of Crashaw's
Kwaidan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: piped and went slippery. The crowd seemed to open and close and flow like
water. They seemed to have no combined plan whatever. There were spears
flew about me, I was grazed over the ear by one. I was stabbed once in the
arm and once in the cheek, but I only found that out afterwards, when the
blood had had time to run and cool and feel wet.
What Cavor did I do not know. For a space it seemed that this fighting had
lasted for an age, and must needs go on for ever. Then suddenly it was all
over, and there was nothing to be seen but the backs of heads bobbing up
and down as their owners ran in all directions. ... I seemed altogether
unhurt. I ran forward some paces, shouting, then turned about. I was
amazed.
The First Men In The Moon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: misfortune might betray us; and now and again, when a grouse rose
out of the heather with a clap of wings, we lay as still as the
dead and were afraid to breathe.
The aching and faintness of my body, the labouring of my heart,
the soreness of my hands, and the smarting of my throat and eyes
in the continual smoke of dust and ashes, had soon grown to be so
unbearable that I would gladly have given up. Nothing but the
fear of Alan lent me enough of a false kind of courage to
continue. As for himself (and you are to bear in mind that he
was cumbered with a great-coat) he had first turned crimson, but
as time went on the redness began to be mingled with patches of
Kidnapped |
