The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered
inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps.
Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background.
We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on,
landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a
God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost
in it; landed more soldiers--to take care of the custom-house
clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf;
but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care.
They were just flung out there, and on we went.
 Heart of Darkness |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: the name of a good seaman, too."
I flung away the paper I was still holding. I sat
up, I slapped the table with my open palm. I
wanted to know why he would keep harping on
that, my absolutely private affair. It was exas-
perating, really.
Captain Giles silenced me by the perfect
equanimity of his gaze. "Nothing to be annoyed
about," he murmured reasonably, with an evident
desire to soothe the childish irritation he had
aroused. And he was really a man of an appear-
 The Shadow Line |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment,
not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions
flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once,
without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a
flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an
immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the
next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward
there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness
accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual
illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did
not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not
|