| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: boom! boom! An awful sickness overcame him,
even to the point of making him neglect his pray-
ers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was
morning or evening. It seemed always to be night
in that place.
"Before that he had been travelling a long, long
time on the iron track. He looked out of the win-
dow, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and
the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads
seemed to fly round and round about him till his
head swam. He gave me to understand that he had
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: of fifteen, who was crucified for an attempt to poison the
Emperor, was sold to his imperial majesty's prime minister of
state, and other great mandarins of the court in joints from the
gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither indeed can I deny, that
if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this
town, who without one single groat to their fortunes, cannot stir
abroad without a chair, and appear at a play-house and assemblies
in foreign fineries which they never will pay for; the kingdom
would not be the worse.
Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about
that vast number of poor people, who are aged, diseased, or
A Modest Proposal |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: that dream of his.
Now, dream though it was, he did not neglect the practical side
of it.
"You realize," he told M. Binet, "that I have it in my power to
make your fortune for you.
He and Binet were sitting alone together in the parlour of the inn
at Pipriac, drinking a very excellent bottle of Volnay. It was on
the night after the fourth and last performance there of "Les
Feurberies." The business in Pipriac had been as excellent as in
Maure and Guichen. You will have gathered this from the fact that
they drank Volnay.
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