| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: terrible by the stillness of every other person pres-
ent. It was contemptible, and was made appalling
by the man's overmastering horror of this awful
sincerity, coming to him suddenly, with the confes-
sion of such a fact. He walked with great strides;
he gasped. He wanted to know from Falk how
dared he to come and tell him this? Did he think
himself a proper person to be sitting in this cabin
where his wife and children lived? Tell his niece!
Expected him to tell his niece! His own brother's
daughter! Shameless! Did I ever hear tell of such
Falk |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother.
It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland
from which I ran away, to part children from their
mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the
child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is
taken from it, and hired out on some farm a con-
siderable distance off, and the child is placed under
the care of an old woman, too old for field labor.
For what this separation is done, I do not know,
unless it be to hinder the development of the child's
affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: the dead.
Chapter 3.XCVI.
'Make them like unto a wheel,' is a bitter sarcasm, as all the learned
know, against the grand tour, and that restless spirit for making it, which
David prophetically foresaw would haunt the children of men in the latter
days; and therefore, as thinketh the great bishop Hall, 'tis one of the
severest imprecations which David ever utter'd against the enemies of the
Lord--and, as if he had said, 'I wish them no worse luck than always to be
rolling about.'--So much motion, continues he (for he was very corpulent)--
is so much unquietness; and so much of rest, by the same analogy, is so
much of heaven.
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