| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: tell how something (he did not say whether it was man, woman, or child) had
lifted up its hands and cried for mercy; had kissed a white man's hands,
and cried to him to help it. Then the Hottentot took the Bushman by the
throat, and dragged him out.
Next night, the moon rose up, and mounted the quiet sky. She was full now,
and looked in at the little home; at the purple flowers stuck about the
room, and the kippersol on the shelf. Her light fell on the willow trees,
and on the high rocks, and on a little new-made heap of earth and round
stones. Three men knew what was under it; and no one else ever will.
Lily Kloof,
South Africa.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: all sorrow, to be endowed with all virtue, to be gifted with all
felicity, and raised into perpetual companionship with a King,
compared to whom the kings of the earth are as grass-hoppers, and
the nations as the dust of His feet? Are you sure of this? or, if
not sure, do any of us so much as care to make it sure? and, if not,
how can anything that we do be right--how can anything we think be
wise? what honour can there be in the arts that amuse us, or what
profit in the possessions that please?
Is not this a mystery of life?
But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a beneficent ordinance for
the generality of men that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength
of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took
the liberty to utter a word of warning.
"You're doing yourself no good by your choice of friends, my dear
chap," he said with infantile gravity.
As I knew that the meeting of the brothers Jacobus was the subject
of excited comment in the whole of the sugary Pearl of the Ocean I
wanted to know why I was blamed.
"I have been the occasion of a move which may end in a
reconciliation surely desirable from the point of view of the
proprieties - don't you know?"
'Twixt Land & Sea |
