| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: bows, and when they had finished their performance and doffed their
great plumed hats to the Infanta, she acknowledged their reverence
with much courtesy, and made a vow that she would send a large wax
candle to the shrine of Our Lady of Pilar in return for the
pleasure that she had given her.
A troop of handsome Egyptians - as the gipsies were termed in those
days - then advanced into the arena, and sitting down cross-legs,
in a circle, began to play softly upon their zithers, moving their
bodies to the tune, and humming, almost below their breath, a low
dreamy air. When they caught sight of Don Pedro they scowled at
him, and some of them looked terrified, for only a few weeks before
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: bestowed upon the body, it receives at her hands now but the
scantiest attention. Its development has ceased to be an object
with her. For some time past almost all her care has been devoted
to the evolution of the soul. The consequence is that physically
man is much less specialized than many other animals. In other
words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
extermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of
mammal. His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern,
such as prevailed generally in the more youthful stages of organic
life--one not specially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it
not for his cerebral convolutions he could not compete for an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to
the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more
microscopic examination. Greatly reassured by his apparent
benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers. But
at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me.
And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold
ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got
frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that
eventuality did not even present itself to my mind. It was
something much more serious, and weird. "This ancient person," I
said to myself, terrified, "is so near his grave that he must
Some Reminiscences |
