| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: all, take care not to spoil one's life. But she did not know--
nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed to me.
VII
Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on
political economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Would it be right? With my feet on the very shores of the sea
and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a
good-natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my
youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the last, too,
of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: passage which had its outlet on the left in front of the temple of
Khamon. This great expanse of water was as round as a cup, and was
bordered with quays on which sheds were built for sheltering the
ships. Before each of these rose two pillars bearing the horns of
Ammon on their capitals and forming continuous porticoes all round the
basin. On an island in the centre stood a house for the marine Suffet.
The water was so limpid that the bottom was visible with its paving of
white pebbles. The noise of the streets did not reach so far, and
Hamilcar as he passed recognised the triremes which he had formerly
commanded.
Not more than twenty perhaps remained, under shelter on the land,
Salammbo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: pipe, my father broke out in this manner.
Chapter 4.XCII.
--That provision should be made for continuing the race of so great, so
exalted and godlike a Being as man--I am far from denying--but philosophy
speaks freely of every thing; and therefore I still think and do maintain
it to be a pity, that it should be done by means of a passion which bends
down the faculties, and turns all the wisdom, contemplations, and
operations of the soul backwards--a passion, my dear, continued my father,
addressing himself to my mother, which couples and equals wise men with
fools, and makes us come out of our caverns and hiding-places more like
satyrs and four-footed beasts than men.
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