| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: back the expanding poison into the funereal swamps, into the
misty lowlands. The watering-resorts became overcrowded;--then
the fishing villages were thronged,--at least all which were easy
to reach by steamboat or by lugger. And at last, even Viosca's
Point,--remote and unfamiliar as it was,--had a stranger to
shelter: a good old gentleman named Edwards, rather broken down
in health--who came as much for quiet as for sea-air, and who had
been warmly recommended to Feliu by Captain Harris. For some
years he had been troubled by a disease of the heart.
Certainly the old invalid could not have found a more suitable
place so far as rest and quiet were concerned. The season had
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: them. Some difference of style, or inferiority of execution, or
inconsistency of thought, can hardly be considered decisive of their
spurious character. For who always does justice to himself, or who writes
with equal care at all times? Certainly not Plato, who exhibits the
greatest differences in dramatic power, in the formation of sentences, and
in the use of words, if his earlier writings are compared with his later
ones, say the Protagoras or Phaedrus with the Laws. Or who can be expected
to think in the same manner during a period of authorship extending over
above fifty years, in an age of great intellectual activity, as well as of
political and literary transition? Certainly not Plato, whose earlier
writings are separated from his later ones by as wide an interval of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: which protruded from the partition at the foot of the
bed-place, containing a mattress as thin as a pancake
under a threadbare blanket with a faded red stripe, and
a folded mosquito-net against the nights spent in harbor.
There was not a scrap of paper anywhere in sight, no
boots on the floor, no litter of any sort, not a speck of
dust anywhere; no traces of pipe-ash even, which, in
a heavy smoker, was morally revolting, like a manifesta-
tion of extreme hypocrisy; and the bottom of the old
wooden arm-chair (the only seat there), polished with
much use, shone as if its shabbiness had been waxed.
End of the Tether |
