| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: the breath of a great and fatal love-spell passing him by in the
room of that East-end hotel. He did look for a moment as though he
had seen a ghost, an other-world thing. But that look vanished
instantaneously, and he nodded at me with mere exasperation at
something quite of this world--whatever it was. "It's a bad
business. My brother-in-law knows nothing of women," he cried with
an air of profound, experienced wisdom.
What he imagined he knew of women himself I can't tell. I did not
know anything of the opportunities he might have had. But this is a
subject which, if approached with undue solemnity, is apt to elude
one's grasp entirely. No doubt Fyne knew something of a woman who
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: seventy yards broad divided by a pebbly island, running over
seductive "riffles" and swirling into deep, quiet pools, where
the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals. Get such a
stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of
pines, throw in where you please quiet water, long-fenced
meadows, and a hundred-foot bluff just to keep the scenery from
growing too monotonous, and you will get some faint notion of the
Clackamas. The weir had been erected to pen the Chenook salmon
from going further up-stream. We could see them, twenty or thirty
pounds, by the score in the deep pools, or flying madly against
the weir and foolishly skinning their noses. They were not our
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: and harder to bear than even the active siege and the noise. The
landlord and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at
last the mob was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in
peace. Today four of the ringleaders have been sentenced to
heavy punishment of a public sort--and are become local heroes,
by consequence.
That is the very mistake which was at first made in the
Missourian village half a century ago. The mistake was repeated
and repeated--just as France is doing in these later months.
In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our
Vaillants; and in a humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled
What is Man? |
