| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: months of my going to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor
and his influence over me were so well known that he must have
received a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic
folly. It was an excellently appropriate arrangement, as neither
he nor I had ever had a single glimpse of the sea in our lives.
That was to come by-and-by for both of us in Venice, from the
outer shore of Lido. Meantime he had taken his mission to heart
so well that I began to feel crushed before we reached Zurich.
He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he had argued
away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove! Of his
devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt. He had
Some Reminiscences |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: emprize, co-operated in some defence, held up the trappings of a
throne, or borne away the corpse of a monarchy. At this particular
time Clement des Lupeaulx (the "Lupeaulx" absorbed the "Chardin") had
reached his culminating period. In the most illustrious lives as in
the most obscure, in animals as in secretary-generals, there is a
zenith and there is a nadir, a period when the fur is magnificent, the
fortune dazzling. In the nomenclature which we derive from fabulists,
des Lupeaulx belonged to the species Bertrand, and was always in
search of Ratons. As he is one of the principal actors in this drama
he deserves a description, all the more precise because the revolution
of July has suppressed his office, eminently useful as it was, to a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: Here again my feelings rose up in detestation of
slavery. I had now a new conception of my degraded
condition. Prior to this, I had become, if not in-
sensible to my lot, at least partly so. I left Baltimore
with a young heart overborne with sadness, and a
soul full of apprehension. I took passage with Cap-
tain Rowe, in the schooner Wild Cat, and, after a
sail of about twenty-four hours, I found myself near
the place of my birth. I had now been absent from
it almost, if not quite, five years. I, however, re-
membered the place very well. I was only about
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
