| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: fact, he had no such facilities--he had no comfortable family standing
behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government
to be blown anywhere about the world.
But he didn't despise himself and it didn't turn out as he had
imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go--but
now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.
He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how
extraordinary a "nice" girl could be. She vanished into her rich
house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. He felt
married to her, that was all.
When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless,
The Great Gatsby |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Riverman by Stewart Edward White: had seen done; only rarely did they ask for explanation of the work
itself. That Newmark seemed capable of puzzling out for himself.
The drive, as has been said, went down as far as Redding in thirty-
three days. It had its share of tribulation. The men worked
fourteen and sixteen hours at times. Several bad jams relieved the
monotony. Three dams had to be sluiced through. Problems of
mechanics arose to be solved on the spot; problems that an older
civilisation would have attacked deliberately and with due respect
for the seriousness of the situation and the dignity of engineering.
Orde solved them by a rough-and-ready but very effective rule of
thumb. He built and abandoned structures which would have furnished
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: chattels which need protection, the latter a sensitive and sensible
being who can afford it; and what is more, he is himself alone, whilst
as for them their name is legion. And here again is a marvellous
thing: that a man should count his brother a loss, because the goods
of his brother are not his; but he does not count his fellow-citizens
loss, and yet their possessions are not his; only it seems in their
case he has wits to see that to dwell securely with many and have
enough is better than to own the whole wealth of a community and to
live in dangerous isolation; but this same doctrine as applied to
brothers they ignore. Again, if a man have the means, he will purchase
domestic slaves, because he wants assistants in his work; he will
The Memorabilia |
