| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: Whose rarest havings made the blossoms dote;
For she was sought by spirits of richest coat,
But kept cold distance, and did thence remove
To spend her living in eternal love.
'But O, my sweet, what labour is't to leave
The thing we have not, mastering what not strives?
Paling the place which did no form receive,
Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves:
She that her fame so to herself contrives,
The scars of battle 'scapeth by the flight,
And makes her absence valiant, not her might.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: support of the labourers employed on the establishment. The
usual number of assigned convict-servants here is about
forty, but at the present time there were rather more. Although
the farm was well stocked with every necessary,
there was an apparent absence of comfort; and not one
single woman resided here. The sunset of a fine day will
generally cast an air of happy contentment on any scene;
but here, at this retired farm-house, the brightest tints on
the surrounding woods could not make me forget that forty
hardened, profligate men were ceasing from their daily
labours, like the slaves from Africa, yet without their holy
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: I believe that he was not a little disconcerted by the reverse
side of that weird situation, by something in me that reminded
him of the man he was seeking--suggested a mysterious similitude
to the young fellow he had distrusted and disliked from the first.
However that might have been, the silence was not very prolonged.
He took another oblique step.
"I reckon I had no more than a two-mile pull to your ship.
Not a bit more."
"And quite enough, too, in this awful heat," I said.
Another pause full of mistrust followed. Necessity, they say, is mother
of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
The Secret Sharer |
