| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: battered and bandaged scarecrow. And, mind, these were
men without the drilled-in habit of obedience. To an
onlooker they would be a lot of profane scallywags
without a redeeming point. What made them do it--
what made them obey me when I, thinking consciously
how fine it was, made them drop the bunt of the foresail
twice to try and do it better? What? They had no pro-
fessional reputation--no examples, no praise. It wasn't
a sense of duty; they all knew well enough how to shirk,
and laze, and dodge--when they had a mind to it--and
mostly they had. Was it the two pounds ten a month
Youth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: much more liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs,
for the most part; with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy
was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. He was
conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement;
but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his
accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the
impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I
was worsted in my encounters, for wasn't the state of his health
the very reason for his coming to her at Prestidge? Wasn't it
precisely at Prestidge that he was to be coddled, and wasn't the
dear Princess coming to help her to coddle him? The dear Princess,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: very much afraid of war being brought into Russia, or rather
of the further disorders which war would cause. He took a
queer sort of pride in the way in which the territory of the
Russian republic was gradually resuming its old frontiers.
"In the old days no one ever thought the Red Army would
come to anything," he said. "You can't expect much from
the Government, but it does keep order, and I can do my
work and rub along all right." It was quite funny to hear him
in one breath grumbling at the revolution and in the next
anxiously asking whether I did not think they had weathered
the storm, so that there would be no more disorders.
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