| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: ailed me, strove to divert me, but it was all to no purpose. He
pressed me to tell him what it was troubled me, but I put it off,
till at last, importuning me continually, I was forced to form
a story, which yet had a plain truth to lay it upon too. It old
him I was troubled because I found we must shift our quarters
and alter our scheme of settling, for that I found I should be
known if I stayed in that part of the country; for that my mother
being dead, several of my relations were come into that part
where we then was, and that I must either discover myself to
them, which in our present circumstances was not proper on
many accounts, or remove; and which to do I knew not, and
Moll Flanders |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for
the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open:
while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in
bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river
between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the
Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with
the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat,
like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames
is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem
very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is
Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum
The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: interrupted before it was over by the arrival of the
committee. Slight sketch of procedure agreed upon, self
appointed spokesman, and the deputation sets off. Walk all
through Matafele, all along Mulinuu, come to the King's
house; he has verbally refused to see us in answer to our
letter, swearing he is gase-gase (chief-sickness, not common
man's), and indeed we see him inside in bed. It is a
miserable low house, better houses by the dozen in the little
hamlet (Tanugamanono) of bushmen on our way to Vailima; and
the President's house in process of erection just opposite!
We are told to return to-morrow; I refuse; and at last we are
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