Chekhov's Mistress
Page 123
Just saw the “Page 123” meme at the Miss Snark site and I was so intrigued by the sentence she came up with, I decided to do it myself.
Here’s the meme:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
Here’s my sentence:
But alas, the plenitude of facts became overwhelming; faced with an excess of facts, historical research necessarily grew ever more pragmatic and exact: the result was a nightmare, a mountain of facts growing larger by the hour, knowledge won, life lost – a failure of the soul, the avoidance of which, incidentally, had not been entrusted to the historians alone.
I was lucky on this because it’s a great sentence. I picked up the second book next to me and came up with “One of the apprentices was there.” That would have been no good, except that its more likely someone out there would recognize it.
I guess we’re not supposed to say what the book is, so I’ll leave it out unless anyone asks.
comments
Alas, books.google.com makes leaving the book title out unnecessary coyness 
“They had withdrawn from their mistress’s presence and were now eating a heartrendingly insipid meal from stands laden with Chinese bowls of more of less the reserved celadon color, but in pathetic condition.”
– Justus (01/04 at 12:49 AM)
Wow. That was the first time I’ve used Google Books and was shocked to find the book there and page 123 so accessible. Very interesting. Still, it is more sporting to NOT look it up!
– Bud (01/04 at 10:21 AM)
Page 1 of 1 pages of comments
Creative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: On Orson Welles’ Don Quixote
