| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: efforts at reconciliation, promising my grandfather to execute a
will in his favour if he only would be friends again to the
extent of calling now and then (it was fairly close neighbourhood
for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in an
appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My grandfather
was an ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as free
from hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the
liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the only public school
of some standing then in the south, he had also read deeply the
authors of the eighteenth century. In him Christian charity was
joined to a philosophical indulgence for the failings of human
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: lauds
So strengthen thee the songs we sing.
9 Indra, whose succour never fails, accept these viands thousandfold,
Wherein all manly powers abide.
10 O Indra, thou who lovest song, let no man hurt our bodies,
keep
Slaughter far from us, for thou canst.
HYMN VI. Indra.
The Rig Veda |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: recently shown that the muscles in the larvae of certain insects are very
far from uniform. Authors sometimes argue in a circle when they state that
important organs never vary; for these same authors practically rank that
character as important (as some few naturalists have honestly confessed)
which does not vary; and, under this point of view, no instance of any
important part varying will ever be found: but under any other point of
view many instances assuredly can be given.
There is one point connected with individual differences, which seems to me
extremely perplexing: I refer to those genera which have sometimes been
called 'protean' or 'polymorphic,' in which the species present an
inordinate amount of variation; and hardly two naturalists can agree which
On the Origin of Species |
