| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: trade depends upon supplying the sea-faring people that upon so
many occasions put into that port. As for gentlemen--I mean, those
that are such by family and birth and way of living--it cannot be
expected to find many such in a town merely depending on trade,
shipping, and sea-faring business; yet I found here some men of
value (persons of liberal education, general knowledge, and
excellent behaviour), whose society obliges me to say that a
gentleman might find very agreeable company in Plymouth.
From Plymouth we pass the Tamar over a ferry to Saltash--a little,
poor, shattered town, the first we set foot on in the county of
Cornwall. The Tamar here is very wide, and the ferry-boats bad; so
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: a man and a woman, together with a dozen green cocoa-
nuts in a heap, rocked helplessly after the Sofala had
passed, like a navigating contrivance of venturesome
insects, of traveling ants; while two glassy folds of
water streaming away from each bow of the steamer
across the whole width of the river ran with her up
stream smoothly, fretting their outer ends into a brown
whispering tumble of froth against the miry foot of
each bank.
"I must," thought Sterne, "bring that brute Massy
to his bearings. It's getting too absurd in the end.
End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: more than one man frequently reposes in another. Yet, if it were
so, one of the memoranda confronted me with a conflicting fact:
"Dinner with Jean, 58 rubles." The unusual amount--nearly fifty
dollars--indicated an act of the most reckless dissipation, and in
company with a servant, if "Jean," as I could scarcely doubt, acted
in that character. I finally decided to assume both these
conjectures as true, and apply them to the remaining testimony.
I first took up the leaf which had been torn out of a small journal
or pocket note-book, as was manifested by the red edge on three
sides. It was scribbled over with brief notes in pencil, written
at different times. Many of them were merely mnemonic signs; but
|
