| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of
an uneasy egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant
in their appeal. It is meet that something more should be left
for the novelist's children than the colours and figures of his
own hard-won creation. That which in their grown-up years may
appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of
their natures and perhaps must remain forever obscure even to
themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice
of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their
personalities are remotely derived.
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: of four hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and
the Museum. Philadelphus buys Aristotle's collection to add to the
stock, and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of
AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more
honest methods. Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with
emulation, commences a similar collection, and is so successful, that
the reigning Ptolemy has to cut off his rival's supplies by prohibiting
the exportation of papyrus; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth
transcribed on parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, which thus has its name
to this day, from Pergamus. That collection, too, found its way at last
to Alexandria. For Antony having become possessor of it by right of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: three hours and never let go!
About two that afternoon the sun came out, and the rest of us
went to the roof. The sleet had melted and the air was fairly
warm. Two housemaids dusting rugs on the top of the next house
came over and stared at us, and somebody in an automobile down on
Riverside Drive stood up and waved at us. It was very cheerful
and hopelessly lonely.
I stayed on the roof after the others had gone, and for some time
I thought I was alone. After a while, I got a whiff of smoke, and
then I saw Mr. Harbison far over in the corner, one foot on the
parapet, moodily smoking a pipe. He was gazing out over the
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