| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: longer need to watch anxiously for the slightest sign of his royal
mood. He is disregarded; but he has kept all his strength, all his
splendour, and a great part of his power. Time itself, that shakes
all the thrones, is on the side of that king. The sword in his
hand remains as sharp as ever upon both its edges; and he may well
go on playing his royal game of quoits with hurricanes, tossing
them over from the continent of republics to the continent of
kingdoms, in the assurance that both the new republics and the old
kingdoms, the heat of fire and the strength of iron, with the
untold generations of audacious men, shall crumble to dust at the
steps of his throne, and pass away, and be forgotten before his own
The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: Y.M. God.
O.M. Where does the credit of it belong?
Y.M. To God.
O.M. And the glory of which you spoke, and the applause?
Y.M. To God.
O.M. Then it is YOU who degrade man. You make him claim
glory, praise, flattery, for every valuable thing he possesses--
BORROWED finery, the whole of it; no rag of it earned by himself,
not a detail of it produced by his own labor. YOU make man a
humbug; have I done worse by him?
Y.M. You have made a machine of him.
What is Man? |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, but
sophisticated and dis-bloomed. They had engagements to keep, not
alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man-
kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there
was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip,
foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business;
they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the
key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds
a calendar of names and dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that
such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy." It was thus they
spoke of their past patients -familiarly but not without respect,
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