| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: murmur. The taller of the two grounded, at arm's length, the
stock of a gun with a long barrel; the hair of the other fell
down to its waist; and, near by, the leaves of creepers drooping
from the summit of the steep rock stirred no more than the
festooned stone. The faint light, disclosing here and there a
gleam of white sandbanks and the blurred hummocks of islets
scattered within the gloom of the coast, the profound silence,
the vast stillness all round, accentuated the loneliness of the
two human beings who, urged by a sleepless hope, had risen thus,
at break of day, to look afar upon the veiled face of the sea.
"Nothing!" said the man with a sigh, and as if awakening from a
The Rescue |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: of the soil, another as a mariner, a third as a merchant, whilst
others depend on various arts to earn a living. But at Sparta Lycurgus
forbade his freeborn citizens to have anything whatsoever to do with
the concerns of money-making. As freemen, he enjoined upon them to
regard as their concern exclusively those activities upon which the
foundations of civic liberty are based.
And indeed, one may well ask, for what reason should wealth be
regarded as a matter for serious pursuit[1] in a community where,
partly by a system of equal contributions to the necessaries of life,
and partly by the maintenance of a common standard of living, the
lawgiver placed so effectual a check upon the desire of riches for the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: which the maidservant had escaped, my eyes had grown used
to the want of light.
I had not meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate
the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows,
but the lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard,
shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I
went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian:
"The garden, the garden--do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!"
She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, "Nothing here
is mine," she answered in English, coldly and sadly.
"Oh, you are English; how delightful!" I remarked, ingenuously.
|
