| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: left hand drawer, rustling under my reverent touch, like a
handful of dry leaves plucked for a tender memento from the tree
of knowledge. Strange! It seems that it is for these few bits
of paper, headed by the names of a few Scots and English
shipmasters, that I have faced the astonished indignations, the
mockeries, and the reproaches of a sort hard to bear for a boy of
fifteen; that I have been charged with the want of patriotism,
the want of sense, and the want of heart, too; that I went
through agonies of self-conflict and shed secret tears not a few,
and had the beauties of the Furca Pass spoiled for me, and have
been called an "incorrigible Don Quixote," in allusion to the
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: tight for a man of his age and appearance, strutted
with a slight limp, and with his head reaching only to
the shoulder of Captain Whalley, who walked easily,
staring straight before him. They had been good com-
rades years ago, almost intimates. At the time when
Whalley commanded the renowned Condor, Eliott had
charge of the nearly as famous Ringdove for the same
owners; and when the appointment of Master-Attendant
was created, Whalley would have been the only other
serious candidate. But Captain Whalley, then in the
prime of life, was resolved to serve no one but his own
End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: which necessarily accompany the first efforts of speculation. Several of
the fallacies which are satirized in it reappear in the Sophistici Elenchi
of Aristotle and are retained at the end of our manuals of logic. But if
the order of history were followed, they should be placed not at the end
but at the beginning of them; for they belong to the age in which the human
mind was first making the attempt to distinguish thought from sense, and to
separate the universal from the particular or individual. How to put
together words or ideas, how to escape ambiguities in the meaning of terms
or in the structure of propositions, how to resist the fixed impression of
an 'eternal being' or 'perpetual flux,' how to distinguish between words
and things--these were problems not easy of solution in the infancy of
|
