| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: love the old thing--something that appealed to my
youth!
"We left London in ballast--sand ballast--to load a
cargo of coal in a northern port for Bankok. Bankok!
I thrilled. I had been six years at sea, but had only seen
Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming
places in their way--but Bankok!
"We worked out of the Thames under canvas, with a
North Sea pilot on board. His name was Jermyn, and
he dodged all day long about the galley drying his hand-
kerchief before the stove. Apparently he never slept.
Youth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the
English language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness,
and its enchanting na:ivet'e, as are supreme and unapproachable,
in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities. Whatsoever is
perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable: nobody can
imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow;
it is perfect, it must and will stand alone: its immortality
is secure.
It is one of the smallest books in the world, but few big books have
received such wide attention, and been so much pondered by the grave
and learned, and so much discussed and written about by the thoughtful,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: recognize one another by the freemasonry of mutual goodness, and
to embrace like brethren, giving God thanks for such various
specimens of human excellence. But it is far otherwise. Each sect
surrounds its own righteousness with a hedge of thorns. It is
difficult for the good Christian to acknowledge the good Pagan;
almost impossible for the good Orthodox to grasp the hand of the
good Unitarian, leaving to their Creator to settle the matters in
dispute, and giving their mutual efforts strongly and trustingly
to whatever right thing is too evident to be mistaken. Then
again, though the heart be large, yet the mind is often of such
moderate dimensions as to be exclusively filled up with one idea.
Mosses From An Old Manse |
