| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: King of the West turns his power to contemptuous pelting of your
back with icicles, to making your weary eyes water as if in grief,
and your worn-out carcass quake pitifully. But each mood of the
great autocrat has its own greatness, and each is hard to bear.
Only the north-west phase of that mighty display is not
demoralizing to the same extent, because between the hail and sleet
squalls of a north-westerly gale one can see a long way ahead.
To see! to see! - this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest
of blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the
aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous
existence. I have heard a reserved, silent man, with no nerves to
The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: no danger of our seeing them at all."
"I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you.
I have no notion of treating men with such respect.
That is the way to spoil them."
Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning;
and therefore, to show the independence of Miss Thorpe,
and her resolution of humbling the sex, they set off
immediately as fast as they could walk, in pursuit of the
two young men.
CHAPTER 7
Half a minute conducted them through the pump-yard
Northanger Abbey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: "Ah it mayn't come to that!" I wondered what it might come to, and
she went on: "Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you
know," she added with a laugh, "she really MUST!" - a proposition
of which, on behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged
the force.
CHAPTER VIII.
NOTHING more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware
before Corvick's arrival in England that I shouldn't be there to
put him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the
alarming illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had
gone to Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the
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