| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: down the Indian Ocean, and up the Atlantic. All its phases
were familiar enough to me, every characteristic, all the
alternatives which were likely to face me on the high seas--
everything! . . . except the novel responsibility of command.
But I took heart from the reasonable thought that the ship
was like other ships, the men like other men, and that the sea
was not likely to keep any special surprises expressly
for my discomfiture.
Arrived at that comforting conclusion, I bethought myself
of a cigar and went below to get it. All was still down there.
Everybody at the after end of the ship was sleeping profoundly.
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Little?" quoth he. "Nothing, man! And yet I'm Hieland born, and when
the clan pipes, who but me has to dance! The clan and the name, that
goes by all. It's just what you said yourself; my father learned it to
me, and a bonny trade I have of it. Treason and traitors, and the
smuggling of them out and in; and the French recruiting, weary fall it!
and the smuggling through of the recruits; and their pleas - a sorrow
of their pleas! Here have I been moving one for young Ardsheil, my
cousin; claimed the estate under the marriage contract - a forfeited
estate! I told them it was nonsense: muckle they cared! And there
was I cocking behind a yadvocate that liked the business as little as
myself, for it was fair ruin to the pair of us - a black mark,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: predominate, before the New Protestantism becomes politically
practicable.*
*The necessity for breeding the governing class from a selected
stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats, however
erroneous their methods of selection. We have changed our system
from Aristocracy to Democracy without considering that we were at
the same time changing, as regards our governing class, from
Selection to Promiscuity. Those who have taken a practical part
in modern politics best know how farcical the result is.
The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth
century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion,
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