| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: should he suppress himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel
Barkers? The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules
and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape,
and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher
power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw
the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of
society instead of the romance of man.
Footnotes:
(1) 1881.
(2) Written for the "Book" of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy
Fair.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Anthem by Ayn Rand: vindicate them--those men could neither carry
on, nor preserve what they had received.
Thus did all thought, all science,
all wisdom perish on earth. Thus did men--
men with nothing to offer save their great number--
lost the steel towers, the flying ships,
the power wires, all the things they had
not created and could never keep. Perhaps,
later, some men had been born with the
mind and the courage to recover these
things which were lost; perhaps these men
Anthem |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: prematurely, and sky and hills mingled in one bitter whirl of wind
and suffocating snow.
'I don't think it possible for me to get home now without a guide,'
I could not help exclaiming. 'The roads will be buried already;
and, if they were bare, I could scarcely distinguish a foot in
advance.'
'Hareton, drive those dozen sheep into the barn porch. They'll be
covered if left in the fold all night: and put a plank before
them,' said Heathcliff.
'How must I do?' I continued, with rising irritation.
There was no reply to my question; and on looking round I saw only
Wuthering Heights |
