| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: be answered. What is in thy mind? What is the utterance of
your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard
intelligibly? It is something beyond the compass of your
thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a
higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
above all base considerations? This soul seems hardly
touched with our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no
fear, suspicion, or desire; we are only conscious - and that
as though we read it in the eyes of some one else - of a
great and unqualified readiness. A readiness to what? to
pass over and look beyond the objects of desire and fear, for
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains
backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of
life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we
are turning. For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed
in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the
"dissolving views" of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it;
all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the
first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as
a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again, - old as
eternity.
[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: it; the land expected it. Men also. The story of war and of
suffering; Jaffir's display of fidelity, the sight of Hassim and
his sister, the night, the tempest, the coast under streams of
fire--all this made one inspiring manifestation of a life calling
to him distinctly for interference. But what appealed to him most
was the silent, the complete, unquestioning, and apparently
uncurious, trust of these people. They came away from death
straight into his arms as it were, and remained in them passive
as though there had been no such thing as doubt or hope or
desire. This amazing unconcern seemed to put him under a heavy
load of obligation.
The Rescue |
