| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: away no encouragement to make a raid on luck. On the contrary,
he felt unmixed disgust with himself the next day when he had to
pay four or five pounds over and above his gains, and he carried
about with him a most unpleasant vision of the figure he had made,
not only rubbing elbows with the men at the Green Dragon but behaving
just as they did. A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly
distinguishable from a Philistine under the same circumstances:
the difference will chiefly be found in his subsequent reflections,
and Lydgate chewed a very disagreeable cud in that way. His reason
told him how the affair might have been magnified into ruin by a
slight change of scenery--if it had been a gambling-house that he
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: to produce an even edge throughout than with the new cutting machine.
If a careless workman found that he had not ploughed the margin quite square
with the text, he would put it in his press and take off "another shaving,"
and sometimes even a third.
Dante, in his "Inferno," deals out to the lost souls various tortures
suited with dramatic fitness to the past crimes of the victims,
and had I to execute judgment on the criminal binders of certain
precious volumes I have seen, where the untouched maiden sheets
entrusted to their care have, by barbarous treatment, lost dignity,
beauty and value, I would collect the paper shavings so ruthlessly shorn off,
and roast the perpetrator of the outrage over their slow combustion.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much
in what form it would find its liveliest effect.
Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal - a frightened
sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they
were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for
something they didn't find. The Dorringtons hadn't re-appeared,
the princes had scattered; wasn't that the beginning of the end?
Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous "days"; her social
calendar was blurred - it had turned its face to the wall.
Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been
the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know
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