| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: knocks? That was not a great affair, surely. I had no idea how
insolent and untruthful these half-castes were. In fact he seemed
to think Mr. Jacobus rather kind than otherwise to employ that
youth at all; a sort of amiable weakness which could be forgiven.
This acquaintance of mine belonged to one of the old French
families, descendants of the old colonists; all noble, all
impoverished, and living a narrow domestic life in dull, dignified
decay. The men, as a rule, occupy inferior posts in Government
offices or in business houses. The girls are almost always pretty,
ignorant of the world, kind and agreeable and generally bilingual;
they prattle innocently both in French and English. The emptiness
'Twixt Land & Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine
in a certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and
not that and that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative
of the economy. So little did they plan their ends that most of
these manufacturers speak with a kind of astonishment of the
deadly use to which their works are put. They find themselves
making the new war as a man might wake out of some drugged
condition to find himself strangling his mother.
So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem
altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes
and the like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all is the rape of
ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the slave-
merchants of Asia, tear from the paternal brain before they are well
matured, and drag half-clothed before the eyes of their blockhead of a
sultan, their Shahabaham, their terrible public, which, if they don't
amuse it, will cut off their heads by curtailing the ingots and
emptying their pockets.
This madness of our epoch reacted upon the illustrious Gaudissart, and
here follows the history of how it happened. A life-insurance company
having been told of his irresistible eloquence offered him an unheard-
of commission, which he graciously accepted. The bargain concluded and
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