| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: plural, which makes it specially fit for critical and royal
declarations. I have a small handful of these sea appreciations,
signed by various masters, yellowing slowly in my writing-table's
left-hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a
handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree
of knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits
of paper, headed by the names of a few ships and signed by the
names of a few Scots and English shipmasters, that I have faced
the astonished indignations, the mockeries and the reproaches of
a sort hard to bear for a boy of fifteen; that I have been
charged with the want of patriotism, the want of sense, and the
Some Reminiscences |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: to the pond, and had long been uninhabited:--
"And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers."
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field,
an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the
broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came
running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the
wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's
knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: And no hand can gather up the fallen withered
petals of the rose of youth.
Yet I am not sorry that I loved you - ah! what
else had I a boy to do, -
For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the
silent-footed years pursue.
Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and
when once the storm of youth is past,
Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death
the silent pilot comes at last.
And within the grave there is no pleasure, for
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