| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: had risen around the ship like a mysterious emana-
tion from the dumb and lonely waters. I leaned
on the rail and turned my ear to the shadows of the
night. Not a sound. My command might have
been a planet flying vertiginously on its appointed
path in a space of infinite silence. I clung to the
rail as if my sense of balance were leaving me for
good. How absurd. I failed nervously.
"On deck there!"
The immediate answer, "Yes, sir," broke the
spell. The anchor-watch man ran up the poop
The Shadow Line |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: dragged bodily to other parts of the farm.
Only once before in her memory had there been such a summer and
such a drought. The corn leaves burned to a crisp brown, the
ground cracked and broke into cakes and dust piled high in thick,
velvety folds on weeds and grass. It seemed too strange for words
to see others harvest the wheat and to know that the usual crop
could not be put in.
Rose was thankful when her last evening came. Most of her
furniture had been moved in the morning, her boxes had left in
the afternoon, and the last little accessories were now piled in
the car. As, hand on the wheel, she paused a moment before
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the
Hellenes--Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.
MENEXENUS: And who is she? I suppose that you mean Aspasia.
SOCRATES: Yes, I do; and besides her I had Connus, the son of Metrobius,
as a master, and he was my master in music, as she was in rhetoric. No
wonder that a man who has received such an education should be a finished
speaker; even the pupil of very inferior masters, say, for example, one who
had learned music of Lamprus, and rhetoric of Antiphon the Rhamnusian,
might make a figure if he were to praise the Athenians among the Athenians.
MENEXENUS: And what would you be able to say if you had to speak?
SOCRATES: Of my own wit, most likely nothing; but yesterday I heard
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