| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on
cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink
a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and
devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and
to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so
small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have
made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
and count it the most arduous form of idleness.
More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where judges
of the First Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: charging at the head of his troops, Mr Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded
his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it,
with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the
Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that
the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening
air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and
hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which
they had not had by day.
"Some one had blundered," he said again, striding off, up and down the
terrace.
But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo;
To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: the number of poor people who wanted employment and wanted
bread (as I have said before) was so great that necessity drove them to
undertake anything and venture anything, they would never have
found people to be employed. And then the bodies of the dead would
have lain above ground, and have perished and rotted in a dreadful manner.
But the magistrates cannot be enough commended in this, that they
kept such good order for the burying of the dead, that as fast as any of
these they employed to carry off and bury the dead fell sick or died, as
was many times the case, they immediately supplied the places with
others, which, by reason of the great number of poor that was left out
of business, as above, was not hard to do. This occasioned, that
A Journal of the Plague Year |
