| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: "He will spin him a damned endless yarn," observed the chief
engineer.
He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic, and suffered from
gnawing hunger in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a
smile that made two vertical folds on his shaven cheeks. And I
smiled, too, but I was not exactly amused. In that man, whose
name apparently could not be uttered anywhere in the Malay
Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing amusing whatever.
That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking mostly into
his cup. I informed him that my men came upon his pony capering
in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: hostile sort of neutrality along the frontier and traffic across
has practically ceased. In the buffet, which was very cold,
no food could be bought. The long tables once laden with
caviare and other zakuski were bare. There was, however, a
samovar, and we bought tea at sixty kopecks a glass and
lumps of sugar at two roubles fifty each. We took our tea
into the inner passport room, where I think a stove must
have been burning the day before, and there made some sort
of a meal off some of Puntervald's Swedish hard-bread. It
is difficult to me to express the curious mixture of
depression and exhilaration that was given to the party by
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: wriggled. And when the horrid suspicion had descended into his very
heels, so to speak, he became very still. He sat gazing stonily
into space bounded by the yellow, burnt-up slopes of the rising
ground a couple of miles away. The face of the down showed the
white scar of the quarry where not more than sixteen hours before
Fyne and I had been groping in the dark with horrible apprehension
of finding under our hands the shattered body of a girl. For myself
I had in addition the memory of my meeting with her. She was
certainly walking very near the edge--courting a sinister solution.
But, now, having by the most unexpected chance come upon a man, she
had found another way to escape from the world. Such world as was
Chance |
