| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: very moment he is about to enter the tomb . . . "
"You must not think," went on Marlow after a pause, "that on that
morning with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let
us call it information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which
I had, or rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral.
Information is something one goes out to seek and puts away when
found as you might do a piece of lead: ponderous, useful,
unvibrating, dull. Whereas knowledge comes to one, this sort of
knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in its repose a fine
resonant quality . . . But as such distinctions touch upon the
transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them.
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: beard who spoke: "How do you do! I understand that we can
buy eight thousand five hundred Rubber Consols from you
at 'twenty-three.'"
"No--twenty-five," replied Thorpe.
The dark man spoke: "The jobbers' price is twenty-three."
"To carry over--yes," Thorpe answered. "But to buy it
is twenty-five."
The two sons of the race which invented mental arithmetic
exchanged an alert glance, and looked at the floor
for an engrossed instant.
"I don't mind telling you," Thorpe interposed upon
The Market-Place |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: insincerity because I dole out to Louis, from day to day, the measure
of his intimacy with me; but is it not too close an intimacy which
provokes rupture? My aim is to give him, in the very interest of his
happiness, many occupations, which will all serve as distractions to
his love; and this is not the reasoning of passion. If affection be
inexhaustible, it is not so with love: the task, therefore, of a woman
--truly no light one--is to spread it out thriftily over a lifetime.
At the risk of exciting your disgust, I must tell you that I persist
in the principles I have adopted, and hold myself both heroic and
generous in so doing. Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in
its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in
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