| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh
meat must be had on an occasion. It is true that the great
Foss, driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but
glorified with legend, might have been induced to bring us
meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk. To take
a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a
milkmaid; after which it would have been hardly worth while
to pause, and we might have added to our colony a flock of
sheep and an experienced butcher.
It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was
not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity
was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying
to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of
us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,--
for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think
that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the
advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions
to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made
another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the enmity
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor
yet with anything reasonable known to this earth. I verily
believe that at times I was lightheaded in a sort of languid way.
At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for
ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my
pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of
paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my
parting bow. . .
When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed
lemon, and the door-keeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to
get my hat and tip him a shilling, said:
Some Reminiscences |
