| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: suddenly faint, he had gone out into the air. Casting about for
a plea for prolonging his stay, it at once occurred to him to
make the most of this excuse, framed on the spur of the moment.
He declined, on a plea of increasing indisposition, to preside at
the banquet given by the town to the French officers, betook
himself to his bed, and sent a message to the Major-General, to
the effect that temporary illness obliged him to leave the
Colonel in command of the troops for the time being. This
commonplace but very plausible stratagem relieved him of all
responsibility for the time necessary to carry out his plans.
The General, nothing if not "catholic and monarchical," took
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.
The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy
in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway
ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery
sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands;
you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted
all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you
thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you
had known once--somewhere--far away--in another existence perhaps.
There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it
Heart of Darkness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: Now I disagree with this poet. Shall I tell you in what respect?
EUTHYPHRO: By all means.
SOCRATES: I should not say that where there is fear there is also
reverence; for I am sure that many persons fear poverty and disease, and
the like evils, but I do not perceive that they reverence the objects of
their fear.
EUTHYPHRO: Very true.
SOCRATES: But where reverence is, there is fear; for he who has a feeling
of reverence and shame about the commission of any action, fears and is
afraid of an ill reputation.
EUTHYPHRO: No doubt.
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