| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: parental and filial relation when they are no longer necessary to one
another. The child does this readily enough to form fresh ties,
closer and more fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from
such compensations: it happens sometimes that when the children go
out at the door the lover comes in at the window. Indeed it happens
now oftener than it used to, because people remain much longer in the
sexual arena. The cultivated Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at
her marriage. The British matron has discarded her cap and her
conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's wife at fifty has more of the
air of a _femme galante_ than an actress had at thirty-five in her
grandmother's time. But as people marry later, the facts of age and
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: There is one article I wish to take away with me: my spirits.
They suit me. I don't want yours; I like my own; I have had them a
long while in bottle. It is my only reservation. - Yours (as you
decide),
R. L. MONKHOUSE.
Letter: TO W. E. HENLEY
HYERES, MAY 1884.
DEAR BOY, - OLD MORTALITY is out, and I am glad to say Coggie likes
it. We like her immensely.
I keep better, but no great shakes yet; cannot work - cannot: that
is flat, not even verses: as for prose, that more active place is
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: prime necessity. It is otherwise with us, where life presents us
with a daily problem, and there is a serious interest, and some of
the heat of conflict, in the mere continuing to be. So, in certain
atolls, where there is no great gaiety, but man must bestir himself
with some vigour for his daily bread, public health and the
population are maintained; but in the lotos islands, with the decay
of pleasures, life itself decays. It is from this point of view
that we may instance, among other causes of depression, the decay
of war. We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary
business of war on the great scale, trailing epidemics and leaving
pestilential corpses in its train, that we have almost forgotten
|
