| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one
another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.
Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a
prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also,
by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Mohere, the
obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No
matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary
singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
too, like Shakespeare and Shelley,leaves versified airs, like
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: he did not at the moment have it with him. Without answering,
Lincoln rose, and going to a little trunk that stood by the wall,
opened it and took out the exact sum, carefully done up in a
small package. "I never use any man's money but my own, he
quietly remarked, after the agent had gone.
Soon after he was raised to the dignity of postmaster another
piece of good fortune came in his way. Sangamon County covered a
territory some forty miles long by fifty wide, and almost every
citizen in it seemed intent on buying or selling land, laying out
new roads, or locating some future city. John Calhoun, the county
surveyor, therefore, found himself with far more work than he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: beast, bad! The gentleman is alive, but you are a dead carcass.
. . . God created man to be alive, and to have joy and grief and
sorrow; but you want nothing, so you are not alive, you are
stone, clay! A stone wants nothing and you want nothing. You are
a stone, and God does not love you, but He loves the gentleman!"
Everyone laughed; the Tatar frowned contemptuously, and with a
wave of his hand wrapped himself in his rags and went to the
campfire. The ferrymen and Semyon sauntered to the hut.
"It's cold," said one ferryman huskily as he stretched himself on
the straw with which the damp clay floor was covered.
"Yes, its not warm," another assented. "It's a dog's life. . . ."
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
