| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: man beckoning to me with his forefinger over the
gate of his house as I happened to be driving past.
I got down, of course.
"'I've got something here,' he mumbled, lead-
ing the way to an outhouse at a little distance from
his other farm-buildings.
"It was there that I saw him first, in a long low
room taken upon the space of that sort of coach-
house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a small
square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty
pane at its further end. He was lying on his back
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: In fury-cyclones, is he borne along,
For all his mouthings, to the shoals of doom.
Ah, so irrevocably some hidden power
Betramples forevermore affairs of men,
And visibly grindeth with its heel in mire
The lictors' glorious rods and axes dire,
Having them in derision! Again, when earth
From end to end is rocking under foot,
And shaken cities ruin down, or threaten
Upon the verge, what wonder is it then
That mortal generations abase themselves,
Of The Nature of Things |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Britain by Washington Irving: France, had been murdered; there had been radical meetings in
all parts of the kingdom; the bloody scenes at Manchester; the
great plot of Cato Street; and above all, the queen had returned
to England! All these sinister events are recounted by Mr.
Skryme, with a mysterious look, and a dismal shake of the
head; and being taken with his drugs, and associated in the
minds of his auditors with stuffed sea-monsters, bottled
serpents, and his own visage, which is a title-page of
tribulation, they have spread great gloom through the minds of
the people of Little Britain. They shake their heads whenever
they go by Bow Church, and observe, that they never expected
|
