The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of
the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up to a walk. A
woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping
blanket over a line stretched between two old ap-
ple-trees. And as the bobtailed, long-necked chest-
nut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
covered by a thick dogskin glove, the doctor raised
his voice over the hedge: "How's your child,
Amy?"
I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with
a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been
 Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: And the conditions may vary between opposite extremes: for example,
in a London or Paris slum every child adds to the burden of poverty
and helps to starve the parents and all the other children, whereas in
a settlement of pioneer colonists every child, from the moment it is
big enough to lend a hand to the family industry, is an investment in
which the only danger is that of temporary over-capitalization. Then
there are the variations in family sentiment. Sometimes the family
organization is as frankly political as the organization of an army or
an industry: fathers being no more expected to be sentimental about
their children than colonels about soldiers, or factory owners about
their employees, though the mother may be allowed a little tenderness
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: would have strained all probability. So I stuck to Mary Fitton. But
I had another and more personal reason. I was, in a manner, present
at the birth of the Fitton theory. Its parent and I had become
acquainted; and he used to consult me on obscure passages in the
sonnets, on which, as far as I can remember, I never succeeded in
throwing the faintest light, at a time when nobody else thought my
opinion, on that or any other subject, of the slightest importance. I
thought it would be friendly to immortalize him, as the silly literary
saying is, much as Shakespear immortalized Mr W. H., as he said he
would, simply by writing about him.
Let me tell the story formally.
|