| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: misfortune. I believed in you in the only way it was possible
for me to believe. It was not worthy of your merits? So be it.
But you were always an unlucky man, Almayer. Nothing was ever
quite worthy of you. What made you so real to me was that you
held this lofty theory with some force of conviction and with an
admirable consistency."
It is with some such words translated into the proper shadowy
expressions that I am prepared to placate Almayer in the Elysian
Abode of Shades, since it has come to pass that, having parted
many years ago, we are never to meet again in this world.
V
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: hearted and crest-fallen, pursued his travels homewards, along
the sides of the lofty hills which rise above Tarry Town, and
which he had traversed so cheerily in the afternoon. The hour was
as dismal as himself. Far below him the Tappan Zee spread its
dusky and indistinct waste of waters, with here and there the
tall mast of a sloop, riding quietly at anchor under the land. In
the dead hush of midnight, he could even hear the barking of the
watchdog from the opposite shore of the Hudson; but it was so
vague and faint as only to give an idea of his distance from this
faithful companion of man. Now and then, too, the long-drawn
crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: Perhaps he had meant to tell her when they were first married;
and then the story of the Marquis de St. Cyr had come to his ears, and
he had suddenly turned from her, thinking, no doubt, that she might
someday betray him and his comrades, who had sworn to follow him; and
so he had tricked her, as he tricked all others, whilst hundreds now
owed their lives to him, and many families owed him both life and
happiness.
The mask of an inane fop had been a good one, and the part
consummately well played. No wonder that Chauvelin's spies had failed
to detect, in the apparently brainless nincompoop, the man whose
reckless daring and resourceful ingenuity had baffled the keenest
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
