| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his
pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I
think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The
meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in
my garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain;
indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have
not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the
setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter
of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change
becoming involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have
been so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 'Twixt Land & Sea by Joseph Conrad: tell why, how, at what hour - after twenty years last October. . .
. Did I ever hear! . . .
I assured him sympathetically that I had never heard - and he
became very doleful. This meant no good he was sure. There was
something in it which looked like a warning. But when I remarked
that surely another figure of a woman could be procured I found
myself being soundly rated for my levity. The old boy flushed pink
under his clear tan as if I had proposed something improper. One
could replace masts, I was told, or a lost rudder - any working
part of a ship; but where was the use of sticking up a new
figurehead? What satisfaction? How could one care for it? It was
'Twixt Land & Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: call "taking notice," by which a child becomes experienced. It is
pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45 all
the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they were
15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of a
child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized
without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere
because he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at
home everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets
what it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible
agents of the community as of right, and with some formal
acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of
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