This week's sentence was from George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'
It was:
'I suppose it would be unprofessional,' said Rosamond, dimpling.
Incense and Insensibility
'I suppose it would be unprofessional,' said Rosamond, dimpling. 'Though I am sure a gentleman of Doctor Whimper's generosity of spirit would understand the delicacy of my situation, might he not, Mama?'
Mrs. Fingering nodded her assent, adding for emphasis a curlicue traced vaguely in the air with her lorgnette.
Momentarily nonplussed by the physical manifestation of the verb to 'dimple' as applied to Rosamond, Jonquil could merely spuffle, silently cursing the tautness of the Regency trouser. Had Rosamond at this point added a simper to her dimpling he would have found himself in an impossible situation vis-a-vis his social standing.
Avoiding those limpid pools and fluttering lashes and fixing his gaze firmly upon the aspidistra he managed to stutter his astonished acquiescence. That Rosamond would consent to accept his hand in marriage was beyond his wildest aspirations and, left to his own inadequate devices he would never have dared ask, but to be summoned by the girl's mother and to all intents and purposes to be ordered to marry her left him in such as state as to be barely able to gibber.
Kitty rolled her eyes. Since coming of age, her sister had launched into the quest for a husband with far more enthusiasm than was strictly considered decent. Displaying the delicacy, forethought and social subtlety of a rutting baboon, these past few weeks had found her dallying disgracefully with all manner of unsuitable suitors. From Squire to swineherd and all points in between, Rosamond had ravaged the village like the Plague in petticoats, culminating in her being discovered by Papa the previous night in flagrante delicto, riding the rector across the billiard table in the back room of The Splayed Pig.
Clearly something had to be done.
Now it seemed this dim doctor was Rosamond's sole chance of matrimony and, snivelling cretin that he was, Kitty still found it in her heart to pity the poor deluded fool.
At that very moment, as Jonquil knelt before his intended bride, the door burst open and there, towering and glowering, stood Squire Garth bearing the red-faced rector in a headlock.
His blazing eyes accused the fragrant tormentor.
'Vile strumpet!' he bellowed, 'Uncommon whore!'
Mrs. Fingering gaped, aghast, her lorgnette plopping unnoticed into her tea.
'Dare I read on, Miss Austen?' sighed her publisher.
Jane stared at her shoes, cheeks flushed with shame. She tried dimpling but regrettably she had never developed the knack and instead appeared merely colicky.
'Frankly, my dear, as a follow-up to Sense And Sensibility, this is unpublishable. It looks for all the world as if you wrote it on your journey up to London.'
Jane could only congratulate him on his perspicacity.
How could she tell him the truth: that she had perfidiously purloined the manuscript of Sense and Sensibility from notorious local roué Mister D'arcy?
What awful price might D'arcy extract from her were she to confess and to beg a follow-up from him?
Jane sighed, sadly.
If only she had learned to dimple.
Showing posts with label Period Pieces. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Period Pieces. Show all posts
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Thursday, 24 December 2009
The Fourth Ghost
In the spirit of the season this week’s sentence was taken from Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'.
The sentence was:
'Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.'
The Fourth Ghost
That next summer a fourth Ghost appeared to Scrooge.
Awakened and irritable, he glared at it.
“Ebenezer, you have been slipping back into your old ways so I have been sent to reform you. I am the Ghost of Modern Christmas.”
“Christmas? It's August, you cretin!”
“Ah, but the Modern Christmas begins in August when festive goods start appearing in the shops.”
Scrooge boggled.
The Spectre beckoned.
A moment's confusion as his own familiar chambers dissolved and the Ghost led him through a maze of tiny boxes. To Scrooge's amazement he saw that each contained a worker toiling in far less space than his own clerk, Cratchit. With a grin of delight he resolved to move the man into a cupboard the next morning.
The scene changed and now those same workers assembled in morbid little groups, bitching about one another, drinking cheap, nasty wine and devouring revoltingly greasy, gristly things that Scrooge could not identify as containing any foodstuff that he had ever known.
In darkened cubicles, in party hats, sordid and ill-advised liaisons were reaching their ghastly, alcohol-fuelled nadir, but before Scrooge could express his horror the scene faded, resolving itself anew into a whole town of shopping streets piled on top of one another, and indoors!
Scrooge and the Spirit swept unseen down miles of aisles, their passage through the corporeal world marked only by the mysterious opening and closing of automatic doors. Scrooge screwed up his eyes against the assault of garishly lit and hideously festooned shop displays, asparkle with shimmering tat, piled high with acres of Christmas-themed goods that nobody could possibly want and books with no literary merit whatsoever.
All around him in the bustling throng, family groups veering from potential divorce to mutual homicide screamed obscenities about one another's relatives and argued over money.
Teenaged girls with bottle-blonde hair scraped back from faces livid orange with fake-tan, yelled and swore into mobile phones while trailing caravans of fat shrieking brats in their wake.
The central altar of this obscene temple of Mammon and Misery was not the Nativity but a monstrous plastic abomination, a grotto from beyond Dante's nightmares.
All around it, parents queued - and paid - to place their frightened children in the lap of an obese and elderly man wearing a patently false beard and a garish red suit who cuddled them inappropriately and whispered things into their ears as they cried.
Scrooge reeled back, revolted.
A succession of similar tableaux passed before his ever-widening eyes, spiralling to a crescendo of tinsel-draped horror.
“Are you telling me that by returning to my grasping and curmudgeonly ways I risk losing all of this? Bah! Humbug!”
The Spirit seemed puzzled by his respeonse.
“But Mr. Scrooge! This is the very Spirit of Modern Christmas!”
Scrooge couldn't help himself. It started as a giggle and then got serious.
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
The sentence was:
'Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.'
The Fourth Ghost
That next summer a fourth Ghost appeared to Scrooge.
Awakened and irritable, he glared at it.
“Ebenezer, you have been slipping back into your old ways so I have been sent to reform you. I am the Ghost of Modern Christmas.”
“Christmas? It's August, you cretin!”
“Ah, but the Modern Christmas begins in August when festive goods start appearing in the shops.”
Scrooge boggled.
The Spectre beckoned.
A moment's confusion as his own familiar chambers dissolved and the Ghost led him through a maze of tiny boxes. To Scrooge's amazement he saw that each contained a worker toiling in far less space than his own clerk, Cratchit. With a grin of delight he resolved to move the man into a cupboard the next morning.
The scene changed and now those same workers assembled in morbid little groups, bitching about one another, drinking cheap, nasty wine and devouring revoltingly greasy, gristly things that Scrooge could not identify as containing any foodstuff that he had ever known.
In darkened cubicles, in party hats, sordid and ill-advised liaisons were reaching their ghastly, alcohol-fuelled nadir, but before Scrooge could express his horror the scene faded, resolving itself anew into a whole town of shopping streets piled on top of one another, and indoors!
Scrooge and the Spirit swept unseen down miles of aisles, their passage through the corporeal world marked only by the mysterious opening and closing of automatic doors. Scrooge screwed up his eyes against the assault of garishly lit and hideously festooned shop displays, asparkle with shimmering tat, piled high with acres of Christmas-themed goods that nobody could possibly want and books with no literary merit whatsoever.
All around him in the bustling throng, family groups veering from potential divorce to mutual homicide screamed obscenities about one another's relatives and argued over money.
Teenaged girls with bottle-blonde hair scraped back from faces livid orange with fake-tan, yelled and swore into mobile phones while trailing caravans of fat shrieking brats in their wake.
The central altar of this obscene temple of Mammon and Misery was not the Nativity but a monstrous plastic abomination, a grotto from beyond Dante's nightmares.
All around it, parents queued - and paid - to place their frightened children in the lap of an obese and elderly man wearing a patently false beard and a garish red suit who cuddled them inappropriately and whispered things into their ears as they cried.
Scrooge reeled back, revolted.
A succession of similar tableaux passed before his ever-widening eyes, spiralling to a crescendo of tinsel-draped horror.
“Are you telling me that by returning to my grasping and curmudgeonly ways I risk losing all of this? Bah! Humbug!”
The Spirit seemed puzzled by his respeonse.
“But Mr. Scrooge! This is the very Spirit of Modern Christmas!”
Scrooge couldn't help himself. It started as a giggle and then got serious.
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
Two Sous
This week's sentence was taken from Victor Hugo's 'Les Misérables'.
It was: 'Between the walls of the two yards there was a dark and narrow street, the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which seemed to be exactly what he was looking for.'
Émile Bayard's original illustration for Cosette.
My own treasured copy of Les Misérables, bound (beautifully but inexplicably) in bright blue leather.
It was: 'Between the walls of the two yards there was a dark and narrow street, the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which seemed to be exactly what he was looking for.'
Two Sous
Nobody gave a second glance to the stocky figure, black clad, bespectacled and riotously moustachioed, as he lugged a canvas sack through the dank labyrinth of Parisian slums which in those years clung desperately to the riverside; a pestilential netherworld of fester and reek, of crime and destitution. Down here life was as cheap and vile as the compendious varieties of vice available in every cellar and alley.
Émile, in his mire-bespattered element had been wandering for days through this godforsaken gehenna, alert at all times for the slightest glimpse of his quarry. His client's requirements were exacting but he knew the area well and was certain he would find the right girl in this most wretched and hopeless human sewer.
By mid-morning the rain had cleared and low grey clouds were scudding on a brisk breeze. Émile found himself betwixt a coopers' yard and that of a tannery, the stench from which would have been unbearable had the bitter wind not borne it away from him.
Between the walls of the two yards there was a dark and narrow street, the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which seemed to be exactly what he was looking for. Scarcely wide enough for a handcart it ran for thirty paces between crumbling, ivy-clad walls before opening slightly into a ramshackle terrace of dingy drinking dens and squalid tenements, the cobbles slick with refuse and worse, the buildings leaning at crazy angles, falling forward like drunks and leaving the street below in perpetual semi-darkness.
Émile's eye had been drawn to the pitiful sight of a small girl attempting to clear some kind of pathway through the filth. A tiny, starved waif, dwarfed by the broom she was using, clad in tattered rags; her lank, matted hair soaked from the earlier rain.
He smiled. The child was perfect. He approached slowly, trying not to startle her.
A woman's shout stopped him dead and froze the girl to the spot. Emerging from a narrow alley like some slimy behemoth, a monstrous harridan charged at him.
"Bastard! Pervert!" she yelled accusingly.
Émile, conciliatory, arms out, palms upturned.
"Madame, your daughter?"
"For shame! She is much too young."
She looked him up and down, haughtily.
"I do, however, have a girl more suited. Do you have money?"
"Madame, please! You misunderstand."
He proffered his hand.
"My name is Émile Bayard. I am an artist and merely wish to sketch the child. I can offer you money but all I ask is the chance to draw her just as she stands. She would add a certain character to an illustration I have planned."
The woman looked from Émile to her daughter and back again.
"Two sous!"
Émile produced the money.
"I really am most grateful, Madame. If you would ask your daughter to stand just as she is for a few minutes …"
The girl's wide, frightened eyes stared up at them as Émile peeled back the proof from his etching plate.
Victor gasped, his own eyes suddenly wet with tears.
Nobody gave a second glance to the stocky figure, black clad, bespectacled and riotously moustachioed, as he lugged a canvas sack through the dank labyrinth of Parisian slums which in those years clung desperately to the riverside; a pestilential netherworld of fester and reek, of crime and destitution. Down here life was as cheap and vile as the compendious varieties of vice available in every cellar and alley.
Émile, in his mire-bespattered element had been wandering for days through this godforsaken gehenna, alert at all times for the slightest glimpse of his quarry. His client's requirements were exacting but he knew the area well and was certain he would find the right girl in this most wretched and hopeless human sewer.
By mid-morning the rain had cleared and low grey clouds were scudding on a brisk breeze. Émile found himself betwixt a coopers' yard and that of a tannery, the stench from which would have been unbearable had the bitter wind not borne it away from him.
Between the walls of the two yards there was a dark and narrow street, the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which seemed to be exactly what he was looking for. Scarcely wide enough for a handcart it ran for thirty paces between crumbling, ivy-clad walls before opening slightly into a ramshackle terrace of dingy drinking dens and squalid tenements, the cobbles slick with refuse and worse, the buildings leaning at crazy angles, falling forward like drunks and leaving the street below in perpetual semi-darkness.
Émile's eye had been drawn to the pitiful sight of a small girl attempting to clear some kind of pathway through the filth. A tiny, starved waif, dwarfed by the broom she was using, clad in tattered rags; her lank, matted hair soaked from the earlier rain.
He smiled. The child was perfect. He approached slowly, trying not to startle her.
A woman's shout stopped him dead and froze the girl to the spot. Emerging from a narrow alley like some slimy behemoth, a monstrous harridan charged at him.
"Bastard! Pervert!" she yelled accusingly.
Émile, conciliatory, arms out, palms upturned.
"Madame, your daughter?"
"For shame! She is much too young."
She looked him up and down, haughtily.
"I do, however, have a girl more suited. Do you have money?"
"Madame, please! You misunderstand."
He proffered his hand.
"My name is Émile Bayard. I am an artist and merely wish to sketch the child. I can offer you money but all I ask is the chance to draw her just as she stands. She would add a certain character to an illustration I have planned."
The woman looked from Émile to her daughter and back again.
"Two sous!"
Émile produced the money.
"I really am most grateful, Madame. If you would ask your daughter to stand just as she is for a few minutes …"
The girl's wide, frightened eyes stared up at them as Émile peeled back the proof from his etching plate.
Victor gasped, his own eyes suddenly wet with tears.
Émile Bayard's original illustration for Cosette.
My own treasured copy of Les Misérables, bound (beautifully but inexplicably) in bright blue leather.I have no idea if Bayard found the model for Cosette on the streets.
Perhaps she was paid to pose in a studio, though from the diaries of Bayard's contemporaries whose works I collect it seems likely that Cosette was indeed a street urchin sketched en plein air or at best the daughter of a friend.
I do wonder - when I see those eyes everywhere advertising the musical derived from Hugo's story - what she might think if only she knew how famous her face would become.
Perhaps she was paid to pose in a studio, though from the diaries of Bayard's contemporaries whose works I collect it seems likely that Cosette was indeed a street urchin sketched en plein air or at best the daughter of a friend.
I do wonder - when I see those eyes everywhere advertising the musical derived from Hugo's story - what she might think if only she knew how famous her face would become.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Berlin. Afternoon of November 10, 1938. The Butler Hüber Awakes …
This week's sentence is from Cicero's 'Second Philippic Against Mark Antony'.
"The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable."
Berlin. Afternoon of November 10, 1938. The Butler Hüber Awakes …
Jerked out of his reverie Hüber blinked at the light and sucked his old lips.
Raising a hand slowly to wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth he heard now the tinkling of the shattered glass and knew what had woken him.
Rheumy eyes roamed the room.
Across whitewashed walls long turned grey splashed a creamy yellow wedge of dusty late-afternoon sunlight, its apex pointing accusingly at Hüber where he sat jammed into a spartan chair that seemed a very part of his own spidery frame.
His gaze settled on the distorted image of the window thrown by the setting sun.
Not yet, he mused. Plenty of time.
Faint and muffled through the mired, grimy glass, sounds sneaked inside his sanctuary: thuggish jeering; the clatter of running boots on cobbles.
Sturmabteilung, Hüber grimaced with distaste. Too rowdy for Schutzstaffel.
That would be the bakery again, though who would have thought there might be anything left to smash after last night?
Nice old lady. They took her husband this morning according to the kitchen tittle-tattle. The maids had whined about having to walk further now to fetch bread.
Hüber shook his head and sighed. Filthy brownshirts going about their filthy business.
The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable.
Somehow though, he knew they would endure it all - both the household and the servants downstairs – and with admirable Prussian stoicism.
His master after all was a solid German citizen and so could show no public sympathy for the plight of the Jüden. Those untermensch may have been bearable in the old Republic but they had no place in the new Reich. You don’t argue with the party line. At least not in a nice, respectable household.
This respectable household just wished things could be done with a modicum more decorum; nobody had managed to get a wink of sleep last night.
Hüber of course held no opinion; he knew his place.
Dozing in his chair below stairs, watching the wall and waiting.
Not yet.
Once the wedge of sunlight touched the corner wainscotting it would be time.
Time for him to disentangle himself from the chair, to creak his weary way up the small bare back stair - old knees cracking like the ancient treads - and to array his master in evening dress.
The sunlight crawled across the wall.
Plenty of time …
Nervous footsteps.
A maid flitted through to the kitchen to fetch water, averting her gaze from him as was only proper.
Vaguely distressing sounds brushed softly at his ears, seemingly beseeching him from the street.
Weeping …
The old baker’s wife.
What could you do?
He repeated to himself.
What could you do?
Hüber glanced at the clock and shrugged.
He would do nothing.
All of them would do nothing.
Blanking out the sounds from the street, he hunched his scrawny neck deeper into the greasy, threadbare felt collar of his jacket, closed his eyes and tried to slip back unnoticed into his dream.
"The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable."
Berlin. Afternoon of November 10, 1938. The Butler Hüber Awakes …
Jerked out of his reverie Hüber blinked at the light and sucked his old lips.
Raising a hand slowly to wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth he heard now the tinkling of the shattered glass and knew what had woken him.
Rheumy eyes roamed the room.
Across whitewashed walls long turned grey splashed a creamy yellow wedge of dusty late-afternoon sunlight, its apex pointing accusingly at Hüber where he sat jammed into a spartan chair that seemed a very part of his own spidery frame.
His gaze settled on the distorted image of the window thrown by the setting sun.
Not yet, he mused. Plenty of time.
Faint and muffled through the mired, grimy glass, sounds sneaked inside his sanctuary: thuggish jeering; the clatter of running boots on cobbles.
Sturmabteilung, Hüber grimaced with distaste. Too rowdy for Schutzstaffel.
That would be the bakery again, though who would have thought there might be anything left to smash after last night?
Nice old lady. They took her husband this morning according to the kitchen tittle-tattle. The maids had whined about having to walk further now to fetch bread.
Hüber shook his head and sighed. Filthy brownshirts going about their filthy business.
The household found these repulsive goings on completely unendurable.
Somehow though, he knew they would endure it all - both the household and the servants downstairs – and with admirable Prussian stoicism.
His master after all was a solid German citizen and so could show no public sympathy for the plight of the Jüden. Those untermensch may have been bearable in the old Republic but they had no place in the new Reich. You don’t argue with the party line. At least not in a nice, respectable household.
This respectable household just wished things could be done with a modicum more decorum; nobody had managed to get a wink of sleep last night.
Hüber of course held no opinion; he knew his place.
Dozing in his chair below stairs, watching the wall and waiting.
Not yet.
Once the wedge of sunlight touched the corner wainscotting it would be time.
Time for him to disentangle himself from the chair, to creak his weary way up the small bare back stair - old knees cracking like the ancient treads - and to array his master in evening dress.
The sunlight crawled across the wall.
Plenty of time …
Nervous footsteps.
A maid flitted through to the kitchen to fetch water, averting her gaze from him as was only proper.
Vaguely distressing sounds brushed softly at his ears, seemingly beseeching him from the street.
Weeping …
The old baker’s wife.
What could you do?
He repeated to himself.
What could you do?
Hüber glanced at the clock and shrugged.
He would do nothing.
All of them would do nothing.
Blanking out the sounds from the street, he hunched his scrawny neck deeper into the greasy, threadbare felt collar of his jacket, closed his eyes and tried to slip back unnoticed into his dream.
The Deathbed Confession Of The Monster "Dive" as witnessed and transcribed by Ms. Mary Shelley
This week's sentence was taken from Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein':
"When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it".
The Deathbed Confession Of The Monster "Dive"
as witnessed and transcribed by Ms. Mary Shelley
I dedicate this confession to my inamorata Katie, for it was she who located the fateful artefact in question, she who presented it to me, and it is she - in addition to your good selves, the remainder of humanity - who must live with the consequences of my subsequent actions.
Pray allow me the opportunity of this brief testimony, notwithstanding my fear perforce that you will never see it in your hearts to forgive me for what I have done.
Suffice that the inopportune happenstance of such a marvellous machine falling within the orbit of my influence is a misfortune the world shall rue for long ages to come.
And yet …
When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it.
The sheer enormity of responsibility it implied staggered the mind and I reeled, dizzy with shock, yet the thing lay within my grasp; it only remained for me to stretch out my hand and direct its power howsoever I willed.
I touched it.
How could I not?
I defy any among you to state on oath that you would have acted to the contrary.
The metal was warm from the sun and the moment my fingertip brushed it a sudden shock of realisation thrilled through me; the certain knowledge that this gift could be used once and once only, and that its effect would rely solely upon my own conscious choice.
That choice was laid bare before me, and what a dreadful doom lay in the choosing.
Should I - Could I? - endeavour to save humankind from itself?
For such a machine surely had this dream within its gift: in a single stroke to bring about an end to war, to hatred, to bigotry and persecution, to inequality and injustice.
Yet doubt gnawed at my fragile ego …
Were I to direct such awesome power for the good of the world would its effect consequently become so diluted as to not benefit me directly?
My parched, greedy soul screamed to keep this monstrous and wonderful discovery a furtive secret, perverting its power for the sole gratification of my own desire.
Yet if I did so, would that not equate by omission to using the thing for Evil?
I quailed before the very magnitude of my dilemma.
Again, if I prevaricated, might - in the meantime - another then discover the thing and take such opportunity to use it for their own purposes, depriving both the world - and more pertinently myself - of the glories of its beneficence?
Mea culpa.
I am but a man and as such am driven by greed and lust.
I am weak.
The temptation to reserve this gift unto myself overmastered my too feeble resistance; the choice was made.
Humankind must therefore suffer still the Purgatory of a loveless, conflicted world while I covet this gift and the wonder it brings.
I pushed the button …
The Marvellous Machine
"When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it".
The Deathbed Confession Of The Monster "Dive"
as witnessed and transcribed by Ms. Mary Shelley
I dedicate this confession to my inamorata Katie, for it was she who located the fateful artefact in question, she who presented it to me, and it is she - in addition to your good selves, the remainder of humanity - who must live with the consequences of my subsequent actions.
Pray allow me the opportunity of this brief testimony, notwithstanding my fear perforce that you will never see it in your hearts to forgive me for what I have done.
Suffice that the inopportune happenstance of such a marvellous machine falling within the orbit of my influence is a misfortune the world shall rue for long ages to come.
And yet …
When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it.
The sheer enormity of responsibility it implied staggered the mind and I reeled, dizzy with shock, yet the thing lay within my grasp; it only remained for me to stretch out my hand and direct its power howsoever I willed.
I touched it.
How could I not?
I defy any among you to state on oath that you would have acted to the contrary.
The metal was warm from the sun and the moment my fingertip brushed it a sudden shock of realisation thrilled through me; the certain knowledge that this gift could be used once and once only, and that its effect would rely solely upon my own conscious choice.
That choice was laid bare before me, and what a dreadful doom lay in the choosing.
Should I - Could I? - endeavour to save humankind from itself?
For such a machine surely had this dream within its gift: in a single stroke to bring about an end to war, to hatred, to bigotry and persecution, to inequality and injustice.
Yet doubt gnawed at my fragile ego …
Were I to direct such awesome power for the good of the world would its effect consequently become so diluted as to not benefit me directly?
My parched, greedy soul screamed to keep this monstrous and wonderful discovery a furtive secret, perverting its power for the sole gratification of my own desire.
Yet if I did so, would that not equate by omission to using the thing for Evil?
I quailed before the very magnitude of my dilemma.
Again, if I prevaricated, might - in the meantime - another then discover the thing and take such opportunity to use it for their own purposes, depriving both the world - and more pertinently myself - of the glories of its beneficence?
Mea culpa.
I am but a man and as such am driven by greed and lust.
I am weak.
The temptation to reserve this gift unto myself overmastered my too feeble resistance; the choice was made.
Humankind must therefore suffer still the Purgatory of a loveless, conflicted world while I covet this gift and the wonder it brings.
I pushed the button …
The Marvellous Machine
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