| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce: living by it, without others talking rot about ambition and hopes
of fame?"
"Cannot an honest writer?" said the Author.
The Tried Assassin
AN Assassin being put upon trial in a New England court, his
Counsel rose and said: "Your Honour, I move for a discharge on the
ground of 'once in jeopardy': my client has been already tried for
that murder and acquitted."
"In what court?" asked the Judge.
"In the Superior Court of San Francisco," the Counsel replied.
"Let the trial proceed - your motion is denied," said the Judge.
Fantastic Fables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us
in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.
"`If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried
to shoot her,' said the man of patches, nervously. `I have been risking
my life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house.
She got in one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I
picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn't decent.
At least it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz
for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect
of this tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day
to care, or there would have been mischief. I don't understand.
Heart of Darkness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel
eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and
half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the
beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe
one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east
reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship
it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred
white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all
truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the
Moby Dick |
