| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: mained in harbour I saw him only twice on shore.
On the first occasion it was at my charterers, where
he came in misanthropically to get paid for towing
out a French barque the day before. The second
time I could hardly believe my eyes, for I beheld
him reclining under his beard in a cane-bottomed
chair in the billiard-room of Schomberg's hotel.
It was very funny to see Schomberg ignoring
him pointedly. The artificiality of it contrasted
strongly with Falk's natural unconcern. The big
Alsatian talked loudly with his other customers, go-
Falk |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: to be missed. So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible
lunch in the refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that
smelt of straw and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his
way through the industry-scarred countryside to this second
conversation.
The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did
that day.
It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and
the south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude
presences of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: interests. On the contrary, what I admire is the fact that he had
taken care to provide himself with an army not inferior to that of his
enemy, and had so equipped them that his cohorts literally gleamed
with purple and bronze.[6] He had taken pains to enable his soldiers
to undergo the fatigue of war, he had filled their breasts with a
proud consciousness that they were equal to do battle with any
combatants in the world, and what was more, he had infused a wholesome
rivalry in those about him to prove themselves each better than the
rest. He had filled all hearts with sanguine expectation of great
blessings to descend on all, if they proved themselves good men. Such
incentives, he thought, were best calculated to arouse enthusiasm in
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