| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: ALGERNON. Women only do that when they have called each other a
lot of other things first. Now, my dear boy, if we want to get a
good table at Willis's, we really must go and dress. Do you know
it is nearly seven?
JACK. [Irritably.] Oh! It always is nearly seven.
ALGERNON. Well, I'm hungry.
JACK. I never knew you when you weren't . . .
ALGERNON. What shall we do after dinner? Go to a theatre?
JACK. Oh no! I loathe listening.
ALGERNON. Well, let us go to the Club?
JACK. Oh, no! I hate talking.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: long illness and very dismal convalescence. Geneva, or more
precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is rendered
for ever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in the
history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth
are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper
management of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm
whose name does not matter. But that work, undertaken to
accustom myself again to the activities of a healthy existence,
soon came to an end. The earth had nothing to hold me with for
very long. And then that memorable story, like a cask of choice
Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the sea.
Some Reminiscences |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: supplements our art, nor upon the paper, china, and bric-a-brac with
which she adorns our rooms; any more than Western science is
adequately represented in Japan by our popular imports there of
kerosene oil, matches, and beer. Only half civilized the Far East
presumably is, but it is so rather in an absolute than a relative
sense; in the sense of what might have been, not of what is. It is
so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities of
humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect
enough to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light
of truth has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own
mental crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways,
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