| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: untrustworthy and infamous, like the placid and impenetrable mask
of an unjustifiable violence. In that fleeting and powerful
disturbance of his being the earth enfolded in the starlight peace
became a shadowy country of inhuman strife, a battle-field of phantoms
terrible and charming, august or ignoble, struggling ardently for the
possession of our helpless hearts. An unquiet and mysterious country
of inextinguishable desires and fears.
A plaintive murmur rose in the night; a murmur saddening and
startling, as if the great solitudes of surrounding woods had tried to
whisper into his ear the wisdom of their immense and lofty
indifference. Sounds hesitating and vague floated in the air round
Tales of Unrest |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: but that he was betrayed by the soldiers under him. Into the
castle poured the howling buccaneers. But still the governor
fought on, with his wife and daughter clinging to his knees and
beseeching him to surrender, and the blood from his wounded
forehead trickling down over his white collar, until a merciful
bullet put an end to the vain struggle.
Here were enacted the old scenes. Everything plundered that
could be taken, and then a ransom set upon the town itself.
This time an honest, or an apparently honest, division was made
of the spoils, which amounted to two hundred and fifty thousand
pieces of eight, besides merchandise and jewels.
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: the result of the loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of
the most important questions of modern art; and there is no point
on which Mr. Ruskin so insists as that the decadence of art has
come from the decadence of beautiful things; and that when the
artist cannot feed his eye on beauty, beauty goes from his work.
I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid
aspect of a great English city, he draws for us a picture of what
were the artistic surroundings long ago.
Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose
beauty I can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which
presented itself, in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the
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