| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: for this simple reason, that they had no middle class. If they
did work well (which is a question) it was just because they had
no middle class--that class, which in a free State is the very
life of a nation, and yet which, in a despotism, is sure to be the
root of its rottenness. For a despot who finds, as Louis Napoleon
has done, a strong middle class already existing, must treat it as
he does; he must truckle to it, pander to its basest propensities,
seem to make himself its tool, in order that he may make it his.
For the sake of his own life, he must do it; and were a despot to
govern England tomorrow, we should see that the man who was shrewd
enough to have climbed to that bad eminence, would be shrewd
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Adventure by Jack London: thousand miles of the far-flung Solomons. The one man who came up
the path, Sheldon recognized as Seelee, the chief of Balesuna
village. The savage did not mount the steps, but stood beneath and
talked to the white lord above.
Seelee was more intelligent than the average of his kind, but his
intelligence only emphasized the lowness of that kind. His eyes,
close together and small, advertised cruelty and craftiness. A
gee-string and a cartridge-belt were all the clothes he wore. The
carved pearl-shell ornament that hung from nose to chin and impeded
speech was purely ornamental, as were the holes in his ears mere
utilities for carrying pipe and tobacco. His broken-fanged teeth
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse--
a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted
and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as
though she had been a pagan worshipper of form
under a joyous sky--and to be awakened at last
from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from
that enchantment, from that transport, by a
fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a
brute. . . ."
With the sun hanging low on its western limit,
the expanse of the grass-lands framed in the coun-
Amy Foster |
