| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: hopes, on the 21st day of the moon [November 14th] at the wei-k'o
[1-3 P.M.] she took the fairy ride and ascended to the far
country. We cried out and mourned how frantically! We learn from
her testamentary statement that the period of full mourning is to
be limited to twenty-seven days. We certainly cannot be
satisfied with this. Full mourning must be worn for one hundred
days and half mourning for twenty-seven months, by which our
grief may be partly expressed. The order to restrain grief so
that the affairs of the empire may be of first importance we dare
not disregard, as it is her parting command. We will strive to be
temperate so as to comfort the spirit of the late Empress in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: I looked politely at Captain Archbold (if that was his name),
but it was the other I saw, in a gray sleeping suit, seated on
a low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded,
and every word said between us falling into the ears of his
dark head bowed on his chest.
"I have been at sea now, man and boy, for seven-and-thirty years,
and I've never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship.
And that it should be my ship. Wife on board, too."
I was hardly listening to him.
"Don't you think," I said, "that the heavy sea which,
you told me, came aboard just then might have killed the man?
The Secret Sharer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: say they, 'this is honesty, this is truth. All mankind are like
us, but they have not the candour to avow it.' The more they
affect to deny the existence of any sincerity in the world, the
more they would be thought to possess it in its boldest shape; and
this is an unconscious compliment to Truth on the part of these
philosophers, which will turn the laugh against them to the Day of
Judgment.
Mr Chester, having extolled his favourite author, as above recited,
took up the book again in the excess of his admiration and was
composing himself for a further perusal of its sublime morality,
when he was disturbed by a noise at the outer door; occasioned as
Barnaby Rudge |
