| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: be sensible to hope and desire I was spared the inferior pangs of
elation and impatience. Hours with her or hours without her were
all alike, all in her possession! But still there are shades and I
will admit that the hours of that morning were perhaps a little
more difficult to get through than the others. I had sent word of
my arrival of course. I had written a note. I had rung the bell.
Therese had appeared herself in her brown garb and as monachal as
ever. I had said to her:
"Have this sent off at once."
She had gazed at the addressed envelope, smiled (I was looking up
at her from my desk), and at last took it up with an effort of
The Arrow of Gold |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: fate was sealed, and he was hedged round to do a particular kind of
work. Magistrates, attorneys, pleaders, all who pasture on the legal
common, distinguish two elements in every case--law and equity. Equity
is the outcome of facts, law is the application of principles to
facts. A man may be right in equity but wrong in law, without any
blame to the judge. Between his conscience and the facts there is a
whole gulf of determining reasons unknown to the judge, but which
condemn or legitimatize the act. A judge is not God; the duty is to
adapt facts to principles, to judge cases of infinite variety while
measuring them by a fixed standard.
France employs about six thousand judges; no generation has six
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: Quiverer? What a name to give the pluckiest little craft that ever
dipped her sides in angry foam! I had felt her, it is true,
trembling for nights and days together under my feet, but it was
with the high-strung tenseness of her faithful courage. In her
short, but brilliant, career she has taught me nothing, but she has
given me everything. I owe to her the awakened love for the sea
that, with the quivering of her swift little body and the humming
of the wind under the foot of her lateen sails, stole into my heart
with a sort of gentle violence, and brought my imagination under
its despotic sway. The Tremolino! To this day I cannot utter or
even write that name without a strange tightening of the breast and
The Mirror of the Sea |
