| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by
raising in his breast a false hope of national independence. It
has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upward
of a hundred years on a diet of false hopes and--well--dog. It
is, when one thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen. Some
pride in the national constitution which has survived a long
course of such dishes is really excusable.
But enough of generalizing. Returning to particulars, Mr.
Nicholas B. confided to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his
misanthropically laconic manner that this supper in the woods had
been nearly "the death of him." This is not surprising. What
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: money for more men than were in reality 'cessed on them.' At
that time it was no strange thing to behold a strong man
begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who were
deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some other
way, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge
from arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the
uplands. (3)
One example in particular we may cite:
John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was,
unfortunately for himself, a Nonconformist. First he was
fined in four hundred pounds Scots, and then through cessing
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: Let us find a higher outlook on life than theirs. Happiness consists
either in strong emotions which drain our vitality, or in methodical
occupation which makes existence like a bit of English machinery,
working with the regularity of clockwork. A higher happiness than
either consists in a curiosity, styled noble, a wish to learn Nature's
secrets, or to attempt by artificial means to imitate Nature to some
extent. What is this in two words but Science and Art, or passion or
calm?--Ah! well, every human passion wrought up to its highest pitch
in the struggle for existence comes to parade itself before me--as I
live in calm. As for your scientific curiosity, a kind of wrestling
bout in which man is never uppermost, I replace it by an insight into
Gobseck |
