| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: suspected that there had been foul play. With them, however, it
was only suspicion; none of them, so far as I know, ever
undertook to analyze the matter or unravel the mystery. There is
no doubt a reasonable explanation, but we must go for it to the
Forbidden City, the most mysterious royal dwelling in the world,
where white men have never gone except by invitation from the
throne, save on one occasion.
In 1901, while the court was in hiding at Hsianfu, the city to
which they fled when the allies entered Peking, the western half
of the Forbidden City was thrown open to the public, the only
condition being that said public have a certificate which would
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: if I was sure myself where the truth of the matter
began. The conviction that it would end disas-
trously had been driven into me by all the succes-
sive shocks my sense of security had received. I
began to ascribe an extraordinary potency to
agents in themselves powerless. It was as if
Schomberg's baseless gossip had the power to bring
about the thing itself or the abstract enmity of
Falk could put my ship ashore.
I have already explained how fatal this last
would have been. For my further action, my
Falk |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: innocent of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the
Japanese never outgrew. The world continued to present itself to
their minds as a collection of things. Nor did their subsequent
Chinese education change their view. Buddhism simply infused all
things with the one universal spirit.
As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is
not even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far
Eastern mind.
Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by
their very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and
fettered fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan
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