| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: suppose they do. This 'ere brig's good enough to get away in.
Ain't she? Guns and all. We'll get home yet all right. What do
you say, John?"
"I say nothing and care less," said a third voice, peaceful and
faint.
"D'you mean to say, John, you would go to the bottom as soon as
you would go home? Come now!"--"To the bottom," repeated the wan
voice, composedly. "Aye! That's where we all are going to, in one
way or another. The way don't matter."
"Ough! You would give the blues to the funny man of a blooming
circus. What would my missus say if I wasn't to turn up never at
 The Rescue |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen
running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure! "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I
should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to
the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."
Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous
donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not. Not ALL. I am thus
emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a
general. . . .
Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and
then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of middle
 A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: and all things were quite ready for use. Enough of the plan of the royal
palace.
Leaving the palace and passing out across the three harbours, you came to a
wall which began at the sea and went all round: this was everywhere
distant fifty stadia from the largest zone or harbour, and enclosed the
whole, the ends meeting at the mouth of the channel which led to the sea.
The entire area was densely crowded with habitations; and the canal and the
largest of the harbours were full of vessels and merchants coming from all
parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human
voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day.
I have described the city and the environs of the ancient palace nearly in
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